Association taxes are collusion subsidies
25Yair Halberstadt
14robo
11Yair Halberstadt
8robo
7Yair Halberstadt
2Dagon
1James Camacho
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I actually think this mostly goes the other way:
Generally people aren't judged for associating with someone if they whistleblow that they're doing something wrong. But anyone who doesn't whistleblow might still be tarnished by association. So this creates an incentive to be the first to publicly report wrongs.
Now you appear to only be talking about small wrongs, with the idea being that you still want to associate with that person, hence whistleblowing wouldn't save you. But there's already a very strong incentive in such cases not to whistleblow, namely that you want to stay friends. So I'm not sure the additional impact on your reputation makes much impact beyond that.
I don't think I agree at all. Relevant quotation, Larry Summers talking to Elizabeth Warren
> “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.
People come with features vectors of which clusters they are bucketed into (Harvard graduate, east bay rationalist, FTX employee, etc). Your reputation is tied to the reputation of that cluster, whether you want it to or not.
Whistleblowers are rare and their effects are minor. In-group cooperation and collusion is a large part of human affairs.
EDIT I agree with you, and just didn't understand what you said. My rephrase would be the article had it backwards:
Prediction: If consortment was less endorsement—if it were commonplace to spend time with your enemies—then it would be more commonplace to publicly report small wrongs.
This is reversed. It's the wrong-doers who are avoiding interactions with anyone who might publicly report small wrongs.
That sounds exactly like what I was saying: the reason insiders don't criticise other insiders isn't because it reduces their status by association. It's that other insiders don't like it, and they want to stay insiders.
1Cool, yes, I agree. But the reason other insiders don't like that public criticism is because it reduces their status by association. Your colleagues paid to get a position in a status hierarchy which you are devaluing, and they make you internalize those costs.
Ok, yes that makes a lot more sense - whilst tarnishing by association increases incentives to point out flaws in your friend, it decreases incentives to point out flaws in your friend's friend.
And since most of your friends are also your friends' friends, the aggregate impact is to decrease incentives to point out flaws in your friends as well.
I think this Is a reasonable model for many kinds of approval/opprobrium. I think it’s a feature, rather than a bug, for a lot of topics.
Especially for those things that are mixed-sum collections of games, collusion is a valuable strategy, and out unclear which way the causality goes: is this the reason that collusion works, or is collusion just another element of strategy in the social game (s)?
You might as well say, "if everyone could just get along, everyone would be able to get along." Everyone has different preferences, and sometimes they are competing preferences. You can put this all in a big matrix, and compute the eigenvectors to find the cliques. Naturally, if my preference is for you to do well, and your preference is for me to do well, we'll want to collude. Naturally, if everyone preferred for everyone to do well—or at the very least were neutral on others' wellbeing—the eigenvectors would be nonnegative and there would be no reason to collude at the expense of others. But there are negative entries among eigenvectors (e.g. the murderers in prison), so there are groups colluding at the expense of others.
Also, I don't think your social collusion problem is as bad as you might think. If your reputation is negatively affected by association, and you no longer like the association, why have you not broken off from it? People do not punish others for a history of association—especially when done in ignorance—very much, especially if you publicly denounce or expose them.
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