Status and civilization

This is an attempt to unpack and expand on this. The original comment will be presented in blockquotes.

What would it look like translated into game theory? (Or is this another instance of what Jim attacks with steelmanning, where I try to translate something that thinks in an actually-different way into something that assumes a pile of unstated suppositions…?)

Actually I can’t come up with a way to game-theoretically steelman it where it turns out differently than neoreaction—“there are certain internalized rules that pass themselves off as having developed in order to ensure cooperation toward increased payout for everyone but it would actually be better to defect because these rules were actually developed by certain factions with limited membership seeking to enrich itself at any cost” would apply equally to both but that doesn’t capture the deeper distinction where… can I express this?

Both progressivism and neoreaction contain the belief that there exist social norms that pass themselves off as being to everyone’s benefit—that is, pass themselves off as existing to avoid problems described below—but were actually developed in order to benefit certain factions, without regard to detrimental effects to other factions.

So you have iterated massively-multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma with immediate payout but delayed penalty (nothing new, free rider problem, tragedy of the commons etc etc etc) and you have to surrender some amount of possible payout because if enough people decline to do so then delayed penalty kicks in and screws everyone (and this is the part where I realize that Kant is not actually completely ridiculous like I once thought he was)…

Model a society in game-theoretical terms: there are many interlocking payoff matrices, some of which combine an immediate payoff with a delayed penalty. This is obviously true in a one-player game: most drugs combine an immediate payoff with a subsequent comedown and the risks of addiction/dependency and of negative health effects arising from use of the drug. The hostility of neoreaction to PUA and the manosphere demonstrates a belief that this is true of multiplayer games also, and some PUAs admit it: for Roissy, promiscuity (both male and female) is defection in a game similar to massively-multiplayer Prisoner’s Dilemma, but with the aforementioned time effect; however, the delayed penalty is distributed throughout society. So if you get ten notches on the bedpost, you accumulate ten immediate payoffs, but erode the social fabric in a small way, in a manner that I hope my audience is familiar with because stating it properly would require more background reading than I want to do right now.

A similar argument is occasionally used to justify the illegalization of drugs: use of the drug the legalization of which is being argued against, the argument goes, provides not only the immediate payoff and delayed penalty to the user described in the previous paragraph, but also a penalty to society, by risking the creation of another addict desperate for a fix, acting under the influence, etc.

A third argument is used in defense of monogamy: male sexual desirability is so unevenly distributed that, absent monogamy, a significant percentage of men will have neither children nor the prospect of having any, and, while the erosion of monogamy would be to the short-term benefit of the top end of the male sexual desirability distribution (that is, they’d have more sex and make more babies), it would deprive the aforementioned other percentage of a stake in the society, leading to shorter time-preference (no kids; what do they have to lose?), disincentive toward productive labor, and a tendency toward revolution, none of which are conducive to civilization-building; so, given sufficiently long time-preference, even the top end will benefit from monogamy.

But the important point here is not that any of these arguments are correct; it is that they are instances of a class that contains some true statements—that there exist actions which provide an immediate payoff to the actor but a diffuse and probably delayed penalty.

This class contains both the tragedy of the commons—independent actors seeking the largest payoff will take actions contrary to the long-term best interest of the group, and therefore of each independent actor—and the free rider problem—independent actors seeking the largest payoff will disregard the cost necessary from each actor for the maintenance of that which allows them to get the largest payoff.

…so to ensure this the payout matrix is fucked with (though that language doesn’t quite capture the fact that there is no Platonic payout matrix that pre-exists the fucking-with, but instead it’s always-and-everywhere in play) in order to make the long-term desirable actions actually short-term desirable…

Incentive structures can be changed such that what would otherwise be to the short-term benefit of the individual actor no longer is. To take the example of monogamy: if the argument is true, it will be advantageous to a society to adopt social norms favoring the formation of monogamous pairs and strongly disincentivizing promiscuity through legal prohibitions or loss of social status. Since there is no society without social norms or status-structures, there is no actually-existing payoff matrix that exists without modification due to social norms and status-structures.

…but this is vulnerable to coordinated (usually top-down in practice) struggle toward reducing the penalty toward claiming immediate payout premised on ignorance of the fact that there exists a delayed penalty…

Defection is possible, since social norms and status-structures can be modified through political action. People/organizations/factions with shorter time-preference will have more incentive to defect. (Cf. Konkvistador’s theory of apocalypse cults.)

…and if this catches on then the strong-horse effect amplifies the immediate payout [of picking the strong horse, which necessarily implies signaling toward its desired goals and probably implies living out its goals—that is, defecting toward immediate payout] and also weakens the prior payout matrix and everything associated with it, making it even more likely that more strong-horse defectors will pop up, and so the payout matrix needs to be modified again to very strongly discourage anything that might lead to a defecting strong horse, because one defecting strong horse not only weakens the payout matrix in a manner that threatens runaway collapse effects by itself but also makes substantially more likely the creation of even more defecting strong horses by increasing the penalty of being associated with the old payout matrix and the payout of being associated with something that signals strongly against it and pushes a desire for even more change.

Osama bin Laden said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” He was right: people can get status by associating themselves with (joining) powerful factions. This is the strong-horse effect. The consequences for the payoff matrix are best illustrated by considering the new and prior matrices in terms of the factions pushing their adoption: the faction advocating for change in the payoff matrix, if successful, has demonstrated not only that it is powerful, but also that the factions backing the old payoff matrix are not powerful; when the factions are weakened, the old payoff matrix is also weakened, providing, through the desire to associate with powerful factions and distance oneself from weak factions, incentive to change the payoff matrix further.

This means that it is in the interest of each faction to display as much power as possible; in practice, this is mediated by the danger of provoking sufficient discontent to dislodge it, and perhaps by the individual consciences of its members. (Which themselves can be modeled as payoff matrices, in a sense. But I won’t get into that here.)

Affiliating with a faction pushing a certain set of social norms is likely to result in the adoption of that set of social norms.

So to unpack the payout-matrix model: it’s all one payout matrix in the end, but it will clarify things to break it down into its component parts. One is the drive for status/power/acceptance, which is the one that’s most easily played; another is financial; and then there’s natural law (or Gnon, or Carlyle’s justice=order=truth), which could be broken down into ‘human nature’ and ‘technological dynamics’. Status matrix, money matrix, nature matrix, techno-matrix. Now obviously these four are the same thing, but the terms highlight different aspects of the same thing and can be considered separate things for certain purposes. (Is this what the triune God stuff is about?)

There are various identifiable components shaping the payoff matrix, but it’s still one thing. It probably can’t be fully analyzed down to its component parts, but speaking of the parts as separate things is useful in order to understand what shapes it. (The standard example of this is the pill and the sexual revolution.)

Progressivism seems to have developed in part out of opposition to the old view of “payout matrix = nature matrix”, where all societal results are predetermined by which son of Noah the members of that society are descended from or whatever. Dialectical materialism adds the money- and techno-matrices; social constructivism adds the status matrix. Problem is, it doesn’t accept the existence of the nature matrix at all.

Progressivism developed in response to crude forms of biological determinism, and acquired a memetic allergy to opposition to tabula rasa and human neurological uniformity as a result.

So I’m guessing it would go something like: “there’s no such thing as a nature matrix and the propagation of the idea that there is one is neither true nor game-theoretically useful-toward-ensuring-whatever-optimal-payout-criterion-it-is-that-we’re-going-for but instead a misguided creation of a specific elite faction designed to provide maximal benefit to themselves without regard for everyone else, but hurting not only everyone else but also them”—but the irony here is that, Born This Way, progressivism has reintroduced the nature matrix and the history of it suggests that it was probably developed as a political mechanism [falsehood becoming truth through acceptance of social construction] to win a particular political battle for a particular faction! (Agree and amplify.)

However, progressivism has redeveloped a crude form of biological determinism: it proclaims the existence of a biologically determined, immutable, and binary opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality. This was once a conservative position, attacking the New Left’s advocacy of ‘polymorphous perversity’, political lesbianism, and other statements of mutability of sexual orientation combined with the claim that it served the cause of justice to adopt and encourage the adoption of these mutable practices.

And then the differences are that (i.e. differing heuristics for identifying matrix-modifications designed to enrich one faction at the expense of others) and also the seeming belief of progressivism that payout-increase in some part of the matrix (technological? but primitivism, so that can’t be right, can it?) can enter into a near-unstoppable omnibeneficial feedback loop (scarcity mentality vs. abundance mentality) instead of amplifying the short-term benefits of defection with long-term penalty while possibly also shortening time-preference and leading to inevitable-unless-the-pattern-is-identified-and-action-is-successfully-taken-against-it collapse, which is pretty much what Nietzsche thought except I don’t know if he actually thought it was cyclical or if (as the term ‘last man’ would seem to imply) mediocrity would become stable and persist forever.

Progressivism thinks that many social norms that neoreaction thinks were developed in order to change incentive structures to bring short-term individual payoffs in line with long-term societal-and-therefore-individual payoffs such that actors with shorter time-preference or more tendency to defect would act in accordance with what provided long-term payoffs to society were actually developed by factions seeking to maximize their payoff at the expense of those outside the faction; in addition, parts of it claim that these norms are actually to the disadvantage of those factions themselves. (“Patriarchy hurts men too!”) So actions that appear to the neoreactionary as defection—that is, as a move away from the social norms that incentivize civilization-building, societal stability and productivity, etc.—appear to the progressive as actually being a form of cooperation—changing the payoff matrix in a manner that benefits not only the individual outside the faction, but also certain factions and possibly society as a whole.

What struck me about the comment I was replying to was its emphasis on seemingly-Chesterton’s-fence-violating emphasis on abolishing normativity and treating people as individuals without any apparent concern for the civilizational effects the proposed policies would have—for, as I’ve said before, thinking civilization grows on trees, and will simply happen without the existence and maintenance of norms conducive to it, and therefore that it’s unnecessary to carefully consider the possible effects a ‘justice’-increasing reform may have here, or allow for variation and difference (there’s a good bit in Past and Present, which I’m reading now, about how policies may take decades, even centuries, to fail, but still be doomed to failure from the start; to this it can be added that these policies may appear, even during their failure, as so morally right as to be irreversible)—and without consideration of the possibility of, rather than abolishing norms, simply swapping out the old ones for new ones, which seems to be what has happened: instead of removing all incentivization/disincentivization based on sexual activity level, stigma has been transferred from high sexual activity level to low, and promiscuity is now actively incentivized.

Obviously there’s much more I could say here, but this has hit 2000 words already and the caffeine crash set in at around the fourth paragraph, so I’ll stop here for now. (The Nietzsche part is self-explanatory if you follow the link. Nietzsche isn’t hard to read! I don’t know why people think he is!) I wish I could come up with a game-like model for all this, but that will require more time; has anyone come up with a (relatively) simple and illustrative (in the sense that Prisoner’s Dilemma and Chicken are illustrative) game that takes into account concentrated rewards but diffuse and delayed penalties, payoff investment (modifying the game toward increased payoff, possibly with a short-term penalty), subcultures/factions locked in struggles for the (zero-sum?) resource of status, and all the other concepts I’m vaguely waving toward now?

I get the sense that I should’ve used the terms “Schelling fence” and “rent-seeking” in here, but I didn’t. I also get the sense that a lot of the work that needs to be done here has already been done somewhere I don’t know of yet.