Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id816300339
Many of us do our best to engage productively, with civility and in good faith, pushing institutions and experts toward better outcomes, even when we disagree. Yet there will always be bad-faith actors — vandals — who benefit from undermining institutions, expertise, and those trying to engage in good faith.
✏️ questions What about vandals? How do we respond to them? 🔗 View Highlight
id816300379
One kind of answer would be to look at a healthy economy — whether it’s a capitalist economy or mixed economy or whatever — it can tolerate a certain amount of free riding at the margins. In fact, you’re very unlikely to find any economy that doesn’t have some free riders. So we take the bad actors as a marginal cost on the success of the economy overall, and I think that’s not a bad answer for a lot of cases.
id816300578
you can find at least microeconomies that are dominated by bad actors — where the bad actors are positively incentivized to win at the market, not just to exploit marginal gains for themselves.
id816300585
One tempting but problematic response is to introduce more regulation.
id816300750
Regulators themselves can become bad actors or be corrupted. Plato makes this point in The Republic: Regulation always invites more regulation, because you need to have rules to determine how the rules get applied, and then you need rules for the rules about the rules that get applied, and so on. It can result in a regulatory regime that becomes itself a form of grift.
id816300758
Self-regulation is probably the better answer here. Which is to say, we can engage in an economy even when we know some people are taking advantage — we just can’t allow that to justify us becoming grifters ourselves.
✏️ I’m not entirely convinced by this answer, but it needs more study I suppose. 🔗 View Highlight
id816300958
how do we manage this rational desire to pursue a healthy, ecumenical, and civil distrust with the strong visceral appeal and satisfaction of attacks and tribalism? Because, let’s be honest, at the end of the day, dogpiling brings social approbation from within one’s own in-group, and it feels good. How do we reconcile that desire with the need for more constructive discourse?