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If people in this “strike” ostracize the people who are vital to keeping them alive, they are going to have a bad time. If people ostracize those who are actually taking advantage of them, they’re going to do better than ever.
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In other words: a world in which people use their own judgment of character is a world in which people prosper or suffer according to how well their judgment corresponds to survival value. People who make this a “popularity contest” will lose hard.
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There’s a weirdly compelling intuition to me that the only real problem with the world is people second-guessing their own best judgments. Disagreement isn’t a problem, conflicting interests aren’t a problem, ignorance isn’t a problem; those are all necessary conditions of life.
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But when a person thinks “that guy seems like an asshole to me, but I’m not hearing anyone else say it, maybe I was dreaming”, that’s a real problem. That’s the world’s store of collective intelligence erasing information.
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"Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence...the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. They're not desperate for a job. They can work wherever they want. So most want to work on things that will make the world better."
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Murphy notes that "intentional communities" fail because people don't reward helpfulness and competence, or punish freeloading and sociopathy. The kinds of people who join those communities aren't even *trying* to do that, because they don't believe character matters.
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Murphy's proposal is strangely simple: "Each person in a community agrees to assign status (i.e. distribute their respect) to all the others according to the others' contributions to the community, however each person honestly evaluates the others' contributions."
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This is impractical for a reason I think you’re missing. Most transactions that go bad are not 2-way but 3-way or 4-way. There are intermediaries. Or the people paying are not the people supervising. Or the people working are not the owners of the capital good being used.
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It changes things because people who can spot bad faith behaviors are often not the ones able to punish it, and are under incentives to not complain. And the ones able to punish often have incentives to not know. The less power someone has, the more they get caught in such traps.
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A lemon market like used cars is a simple example. If you can only afford used cars, you have to deal with an intermediary market where bad actors drive out good. Blue book, dealer certification, online reputation mechanisms, nothing works particularly well to mitigate.