Amerika

As democracy winds down, we see what we have lost, namely culture which we replaced with diversity. Instead, scientific management tries to come up with means-over-ends methods which can substitute for realistic time-honored practices, resulting in an updated prisoner’s dilemma:

Kessinger says that, as in the paper about gossip, the game-theoretical model here is a one-shot donation game, also known as a simplified prisoner’s dilemma. Each player can choose to help or not help their partner, and players will periodically update their views of each other’s reputations by observing each other’s interactions with other players, to see if the partner cooperates or “defects” with others. More periodically, players update their strategies.

The idea of indirect reciprocity is “not that I’m nice to Mari because she was nice to me; it’s that I’m nice to Mari because she was nice to Josh, and I have a good opinion of Josh,” Kessinger says.

In this study, “the basic idea is that if you observed two interactions of somebody and at least one of them was an action that you would consider good, then you cooperate with that player, but otherwise you defect with them.”

As has been said here many times in the past, almost everything “modern” arises from the same ideas. In this case, like Google’s PageRank, this is a reputation scoring system to serve in lieu of cultural norms, mores, and calendars which show us which people are contributing parts of civilization and which are merely confused.

Tags: reputation scoring, scientific management