Modeling cycles of grift with evolutionary game theory
oranlooney.com

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69 points

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ibobev

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3 days ago

30 comments

smogcutter ・ 4 hours ago

I think a missing piece of this analysis for the present is the way that hyper-skepticism can come back around and make you just a different type of mark. Sovereign citizens, for example.

  • kerblang ・ 26 minutes ago

    I don't there is some threshold of extreme skepticism at which someone suddenly reverses polarity under skeptical duress and flips over into a mark. Rather, you just have a mark trying to be good at skepticism and failing horribly.

  • Edman274 ・ 3 hours ago

    People that don't buy insurance because they think it's a scam, then end up impoverished after a foreseeable accident or theft, as a more common one.

    • carlosjobim ・ 2 hours ago

      Foreseeable accident?

      • zoklet-enjoyer ・ 2 hours ago
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        Not buying flood insurance while living in a flood plain is an example I've seen in my city

        • macintux ・ 2 hours ago
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          How many renters have a useful amount of renter's insurance?

          • zoklet-enjoyer ・ 2 hours ago

            Probably a lot? I've moved around a bunch over the past 20 years, so have had several landlords. I think all of them for the past decade have required proof of insurance when signing the lease. I don't think anyone I rented from required it before 2018ish

  • MoltenMan ・ 31 minutes ago

    I think this makes sense as part of the existing 'skeptic cost'

  • mnky9800n ・ 3 hours ago

    Sovereign citizenry is such a strange thing to me. It’s all the parts of a conspiracy theory with none of the interesting things like aliens or lizard people. No those are replaced with strange interpretations of laws and ordinances.

    • Muromec ・ 34 minutes ago

      It's not strange really, it's tax evasion with an addition of larping to not feel bad. Oppressive government is in fact out there, but you feel that you can neither challenge nor escape it, so it's just that -- sublimation of sorts

  • dooglius ・ 2 hours ago

    What exactly is hyper-skeptical about them?

jurschreuder ・ 3 hours ago

A population of Marks is a highly efficient one. At the speed of trust.

In a company you will want to cultivate this, since interactions within the company are far more frequent than with the outside world.

  • Muromec ・ 32 minutes ago

    The same applies to the country population -- it's always them others who are up to something.

notatoad ・ an hour ago

>Grift is cyclical, and any period of high grift will soon give way to a period of high skepticism

so how do you explain the immediate jump from crypto grift straight into AI grift? i'm not saying all crypto or all AI is pure grift, but both of those industries have had higher than average levels of grift, without any skepticism in between them. The NFT crash did not seem to be followed by any period of skepticism at all.

w10-1 ・ 4 hours ago

To this model I would add the transaction costs for vetting a transaction, the cost of identifying and engaging transaction partners, and the relative sensitivity to a negative outcome (the stake as a percentage of total stake).

I believe that would enable you to identify more or less corrupt industries.

Unfortunately, both stakes and information costs make governance prone to abuse. To see why it’s not nearly as corrupt as one might expect from this model, you’d need reputation cost and benefit, where trusted governments and leaders attract higher functioning citizens and industries.

apothegm ・ 3 days ago

Maybe, but… the cycle can be very long. Everyone in Russia is a skeptic or a grifter, and it’s been that way for decades with no sign of grift being on its way out.

  • lukas099 ・ 3 hours ago

    Sounds like they've reached an evolutionarily stable equilibrium and the conditions that sustain it are stable too.

    • carlosjobim ・ 2 hours ago

      Birth rates are the evidence against this, and this is true for all industrialized nations.

  • w10-1 ・ 4 hours ago

    The vast majority have justified skepticism from long history of abuse. But very few people are grifters, because that would require an expensive roof. missing from my transactional analysis is a general goodwill, the likelihood that someone would help if it didn’t cost much. In Russia, the skepticism is so high that one only helps one’s close friends.

bediger4000 ・ 3 days ago

This is a great post. It's even got useful ternary diagrams, and it gives an explanation of why the NFT grift disappeared. Too bad cryptocurrency in general is only mentioned in the context of rug pulls. This theory must not extend as far as whatever powers crypto.

MarkusQ ・ 4 hours ago

The meta strategy seems clear: if the world seems full of grifters, stop being a Mark, and start being a Skeptic.

Or, I suppose, go on thinking this time is different.

  • energy123 ・ 4 hours ago

    Don't believe the latest fashion on social media, including the latest thing it's fashionable to be sceptical about. That rule of thumb performed well the last 10 years.

    • MarkusQ ・ an hour ago

      > Don't believe the latest fashion on social media, including the latest thing it's fashionable to be sceptical about.

      I don't think choosing to believe in something just because other people are piling on being skeptical of it is a viable strategy. If you hear a lot of people pointing out "X is a scam" you shouldn't refuse to believe them on principle.

    • allthetime ・ 4 hours ago

      The simple version: get off social media.

      The dilemma for me is that aspects of social media (namely information sharing and learning) are incredibly useful, while others (contrarian argumentation, propaganda, attention black holes) are very harmful.

      I go through cycles of abstaining from online interaction because I’ve sunk into the dark side too much but then return with a stronger intention in order to feed my hobbies and mind. I’ve found that it’s not so simple to just “not believe” what you see and read as being constantly bombarded with political messaging necessarily pushes you to one side or the other unconsciously.

      So yeah, for me the best way is to cut that feed off entirely, instead of pretending I have any kind of effective fire wall against its deeper mental effects.

  • kruffalon ・ 2 hours ago

    I don't think that's a viable strategy.

    If you're a Mark (=trusting person) I don't think you can just decide to become a Skeptic.

    I admit I skimmed the article and even if I would read more closely I don't think I would understand it better.

    I'll use my intuition for how individuals transition between the roles.

    Mark -> Skeptic: requires to be have been grifted and possibly having the grift explained by a Skeptic. Or possibly having someone close to you get grifted.

    Mark -> Grifter: I'm not sure it's possible, but maybe the corruption pdf posted[0] is a clue.

    Skeptic -> Grifter: desillusion about the point of not grifting since everyone else is doing it too. So maybe late stage corruption[0] or just nihilism based on seeing grifts succeed so much.

    Skeptic -> Mark: honestly... Shrooms maybe? Or finding and being chosen into a trusting community.

    Grifter -> Skeptic: I think realising that you've hurt someone in an unexpectedly harsh way could help this transition. Otherwise I don't really know besides being short of Marks.

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    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47177186

intalentive ・ 3 hours ago

I am going to steal this code and run a different analysis. The author mentions that skeptics avoid grifters without punishing them. I am curious how things play out in the Seven Samurai model, where instead of marks you have peasants and instead of grifters you have bandits. What happens if you have samurai not skeptics? Who both take rice from the peasants and protect them from greater exploitation by bandits.

This would be a simple governance model, and you could predict something like “revolution” when the cost of samurai exceeds their benefit.

UncleOxidant ・ an hour ago

What about grifters who are also marks? Grifters aren't immune from grift.

FrustratedMonky ・ 3 hours ago

this "The start of a slide into a new post-truth dark age?"

Not sure we'll evolutionarily get out of the loop this time.

From 2016 to 2026. That is 10 years for Republicans to realize they are being grifted, scammed, etc... Not sure they will ever be realizing it. Will take another generation. Which I guess is the point, another generation of evolution cycles might break the loop.