Software developer and artist.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Sure, it’s advantageous in the short-term. I think this is where we misunderstand each other. What I’m trying to say is that under normal circumstances, individuals aren’t maximizing their output. They are just living as part of the community, following the unwritten rules and benefiting from that. (In the prisoner’s dilemma, this would be choice A).


  • If this is how everyone would act in their daily life, you would see crime, theft and abuse on an unimaginable level. No, people don’t always do what benefits them “at every individual point”. We are social creatures, acting as a community where the individuals benefit from working together. Although this has been successfully undermined by capitalism and other hierarchies.

    This whole concept is also called, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, one of my favorite thought experiments because it shows how being rational can result in everyone being worse off.


  • Yes. The “tragedy of the commons” is a myth.

    Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

    This is factually false, because the land will be destroyed and individuals don’t benefit, not even in the short term. Commons work great (see open source software), but capitalism and power structures abuse and destroy them for short-term profit.