Conversation

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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It does seem to bolster my argument rather than to reject it though. A community of people selected rigorously to *not* engage in self-and-other-destructive behavior will do better than a community that lets such "wrecking balls" in.
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I’d bet against it. You’ll just move the fragility to a different locus: the relative closed-ness created by strong gatekeeping mechanisms. There’s some sort of no-free-lunch theorem here that I suspect can only be broken by adding a technological prosthetic that raises the floor