Overactive cheater detection is at the root of a lot of societal problems. It’s not that people are dumb when acting under biases but that they’re only smart about problems framed as cheater-detection.

You can work on eliminating 100 biases, or just on lowering cheater-response. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1343974533972197376

The thing is, we’re not in a high-scarcity ape-troop environment where detecting and responding to cheating of various sorts is the dominant life problem and ordinary existential threat. Modern societies can tolerate a ton of cheating, from trivial to profound, and survive fine.

We live in a high-abundance, low-threat world, with birth control and consensual basis for most transactions, and most material needs met via cash transactions. That alone, regardless of cheating levels, is a huge change from sneaking around alpha gorilla for food and fucks.

I suspect just two moves, if widely practiced, would start radically rebuilding trust.

1. Preferentially deal with people you do trust
2. Weaken instinct to punish reciprocally*

* tit-for-two-tats over tit-for-tat for you IPD mavens... compensate for complexity-noise

The thing is, the more complex+benevolent an environment, the easier life is, but the less you understand how anything works. That doubt+abundance is like catnip to cheater-detection instincts. They’re firing like crazy, but there is no obvious target you can direct response at.

Since nothing is going wrong to justify a response proportionate to your sense of ongoing unfairness (which is what doubt/uncertainty translates to in a cheater-mindset), you end up massively over-reacting to minor signs of cheating and updating priors wholesale on environment.

This doesn’t mean being gullible, or leaving open opportunistic attack surfaces. Walking around with a “kick me” sign is a bad idea, regardless of abundance. But consider treating cheating as a problem comparable to sewage or trash management. Not as existential threat.

One of the greatest luxuries an abundant society offers is that you can afford to let people get away with stuff up to a point. The fear that you’d be encouraging them is misguided. Every vendor who overcharges you by $1 will not turn into a Trump if left unpunished.

Most cheating is homeostatic. It is on the margins of default non-cheating behavior, and self-regulates. Few people get addicted to a cancerously expanding behaviors of ”let me see just how much I can get away with.” For most, the behavior stops where risk of shame mounts.

A good example is Gavin Newsom vs Donald Trump. Newsom is an ordinary, mediocre politician who cheats in small-to-medium ways (cheating in marriage, the French Laundry incident), but is essentially a socially controllable cheater. Par for the course for politician behavior.

Trump has been such a disaster for trust because he’s a lifelong addict of what-I-can-get-away-with. It’s actually kinda a positive that the system wasn’t designed with people like him in mind. For most, like Newsom, threat of shaming and visible-norms-based checks are enough.

A society designed to prevent Trump-like behaviors would be over-engineered against cheaters. It’s actually fine I think to have someone like him show up, hack the system, and provide a resentment-steam outlet every generation or so.

In any attempt to get to a “new normal” it would be a mistake to lower reliance on norms. When you trust norms, you risk the occasional metastasized cheater mega-event, but your average trust stays high and the average cost of governance stays low.

Norms-based trust, as opposed to trustless verification, catalyzes positive-sum relationships. It’s like free weights over machine. How are you going to learn to trust others and not overreact to cheaters if you never give yourself the chance to learn positive trust patterns?

It’s actually analogous to the core of religious faith. To demand proof of god is to lack faith. To verify everything in society is to trust nothing in society.

It’s healthy to have a sort of religious faith in society, where you risk the occasional Trump by trusting by default.

There’s better ways to signal your lack of gullibility and exploitability than bringing a hostile suspicion to all situations where there’s uncertainty and giving yourself all the benefit of doubt because “everybody is out to get you.”

It’s okay to sometimes give the benefit of doubt to parties besides yourself, *even if they get things wrong often* — bureaucracies, politicians, obtuse customer-service reps, people who think DC is better than Marvel, someone who may have already had a first slice of cake...

It’s okay to be the sucker once in a while so long as you don’t develop a persistent reputation as a sucker (harder than you think). It’s okay to occasionally pay for others’ mistakes.

And it’s dumb to think *you* behave with 100% honesty and intelligence when people trust *you*

The astounding thing about modern civilization is that small-to-medium mistakes and cheats generally don’t kill you or even significantly worsen your life. The only thing that’s easy to damage is your sense of dignity. The main cost of most cheating is the outraged overreaction.

Dignity protection instincts are flip side of over-developed cheater detection cognition. When your entire existence can be put at risk by a small cheat in a scarcity-shaped environment, of course you’ll be primed to kill over small threats to dignity. Reputation is everything.

It’s weird to find myself arguing this, since most of my own reputation is built on making fun of cluelessness and peddling theories of sociopathy, deception, and false consciousness. I’m effectively saying here — *it’s clueless to be over-invested in not being clueless.*

Ie it’s fine to be clueless when there’s little at stake. Does it matter if you, as a dollar-rich American, go to a third-world country and get taken for say $5 due to cluelessness about something, when $5 is a cheap lunch for you and a week of food for the “sociopath cheater”?

The trick is not never being clueless. It is knowing WHEN to activate and use all your cheater instincts to the best of your ability, and to keep those instincts practiced enough to use when needed. Occasional embarrassment from being “taken in” is fine.

“Everything burned down, but at least nobody ever fooled ME”

That’s what things feel like now. And the vibe is strongest among those who believe utterly crackpot things of course. They’re the most certain they’ve beaten the evil demonic cheaters.

Heuristic for non-scarcity societies

Fool me once, maybe it was an honest mistake
Fool me twice, I’ll let you get away with it
Fool me thrice, shame on you
Fool me 4 times, I stop dealing with you
Fool me 5 times, I finally react and it will be effective but not vindictive