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HardlyCognizanttoday at 3:54 PM1 replyview on HN

It's the prisoner's dilemma. I believe any self-preservation optimized intelligence is going to suffer from these problems until those behaviors are countered in interaction by design (e.g. process, societal/cultural pressures, etc.) or removed from the baseline (i.e. evolved out.)

Our desires make us our own worst enemies, and until we acknowledge and openly plan to counter these tendencies, any social structure at some scale is going to fail to them. Unfortunately, the problems we face as a species are increasingly at larger and larger scales.

I'm not sure if we can remain what we would recognize as "human," and solve for this without surrendering some level of executive function to an entity not afflicted by it. Government and regulation are already expressions of this, while retaining our intrinsic nature, but history has demonstrated this is inherently unstable.


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AlotOfReadingtoday at 4:59 PM

Human societies already have solutions to this problem. There's a proposed explanation for why strict religious groups (like the Amish) survive so well: costly signaling. There are benefits to remaining in the community, so you have to demonstrate adherence to the group by constant, expensive signaling to keep receiving them.

In a union context, that could be anything from dues, to volunteering for shitty work, to community service obligations. Unions don't really exercise the power to expel members though, because it reduces their own leverage.