Тег: bullying

If you vote, be responsible!

Perhaps you have read the latest book by the famous philosopher Nassim Taleb, “Skin in the Game“. If not, let me remind you of its main idea: in order for a person to have the motivation to carefully consider their action and its consequences before acting, they must not only benefit from the action but also risk something valuable (be prepared to face negative consequences).

The most famous example is the difference between a business owner and a hired manager. If the owner makes an important decision, they can either make a good profit or bankrupt the company, leaving themselves without means of subsistence. A manager is a completely different story: if they make a profitable decision, they will receive a substantial reward from the owner, but if they make a mistake, the company will go bankrupt, while they personally will lose, at most, their job and will most likely quickly find employment at a new company. Understanding this asymmetry of risks, business owners often offer managers stock options so that they are more invested in the fate of the company, “risking their own skin” by losing money if they screw up.

The same idea from Taleb’s book applies to politics. Every time you vote in elections or referendums, you are exercising violent coercion against all peaceful people in society while risking nothing. Suppose you believe that casinos should be banned in the country. If you were acting independently, you would have to go to every casino in the country and force their owners to close. Obviously, you wouldn’t do that—the very first casino owner you approached would simply shoot you. But it is a completely different matter when you, like some vile, cold-blooded pedophile, take advantage of the uneven balance of the potential for violence (BPV) between a casino owner and a stationary bandit (the state). You anonymously vote in a referendum to ban all casinos, pay a vanishingly small portion of your own income in the form of taxes (the enforcement of a specific ban that benefits you personally costs 0.01% of the total taxes you pay), and meanwhile risk nothing personally (you don’t have to go to each casino owner personally and risk being killed; the security forces will do it for you).

It is clear that such behavior leads to the degeneration of society. It is like giving maniacs free rein to rape children without risking meeting resistance. This must not continue… and it won’t! Participating in voting is not like receiving a billion bucks in your bank account; it is just a small moral satisfaction from the possibility of trying to coerce your neighbor for free. Since the satisfaction is small, the negative stimulus needed to deter participation in voting needs only to be tiny.

A fairly simple scheme emerges for how to raise the costs of complicity in initiating violence against one’s neighbor by participating in some vote. Did you find out that Vasyan from the next entrance voted for “United Russia” in yesterday’s elections? Pay 100 rubles to local hooligans and they will write “A maniac lives here” on his apartment door or post a flyer with his photo in the entrance saying “This person from your building rapes children.” The photos end up on social networks, and in the next elections, members of the election commissions sit in proud solitude. Coercing one’s neighbor has become “too expensive,” so one has to learn how to negotiate with them.

For the mass application of the described scheme, it is possible to create a crowdfunding service analogous to the previously described service for the deanonymization of officials and security forces. Harassing Vasyans will be a thousand times cheaper than harassing a well-guarded official, so one can count on mass appeal.

Bitarch

Online bullying

I was asked to comment on the case of Zalina Marshenkulova.

I will briefly outline the facts. Till Lindemann filmed a music video that apparently contains (I haven’t watched it) sex scenes. Several actresses turned out to be Russian; they were deanonymized, their contacts were posted on 2ch (I don’t read it), and calls for violence were made right there. Zalina asked for the contacts to be removed, after which 2ch began calling for violence against her as well.

I’ll start by saying that calls to remove anything from 2ch are pointless. The main point of this garbage heap is that things are posted there anonymously and without censorship. If 2ch were to introduce systemic censorship, people would simply move their trolling to a less stifling platform. If the owners of such platforms are persecuted, people will start writing on the blockchain of some Steam or Voice.

I recommend everyone reread the chapter from Mechanics of Freedom published the day before yesterday about the public good. When someone writes a post on 2ch, it is a private good: the author receives all the benefits from the publication that interest them, and the opinion of others either doesn’t interest them at all or is one of the benefits for them. When someone tries to systematically fight certain types of publications on 2ch or deanonymize their authors, it is a public good. Such activity can bring small benefits to a large group of people, but the person who puts in the primary effort spends disproportionately more than the benefit they personally receive. Others spend nothing, except for the money to buy popcorn.

Public goods always suffer from underproduction. I have encountered a similar problem in my own chat. I positioned it as a place where one could chat with me on random topics or clarify something regarding the channel’s publications. No ideological filtering was intended; the only request to the public was to remain friendly. It’s unknown what the majority of the public wanted, but the targeted efforts of a small group were enough to turn the chat into a rather unpleasant place for me. I barely suppressed the urge to delete the chat, transferred the creator rights to another person, and since I cannot maintain friendliness toward its participants right now, I simply archived it. Mockery, stupid repetitive copypastas, attempts to fish for more personal information for deanonymization or to demonstrate my incompetence—all these are things that bring me no joy and are extremely costly to fight, so it’s easier for me to abandon the chat entirely than to try to ensure a pleasant atmosphere there.

But as soon as someone tries to bring something from the internet into real life, the situation reverses. An attempt to harass a person in real life over some nonsense attributed to them on the internet is the production of a public evil. All the costs fall on the perpetrator, while the internet just laughs, especially if the perpetrator fails in a funny way. It doesn’t even matter if they succeed in humiliating the target of the harassment in a funny way or fail miserably in a funny way. The attacker gains no significant benefit. For the defending party, self-defense is a private good from the production of which they receive all the benefits, and therefore they are fully motivated to invest in it.

It is thanks to this system of economic incentives that we have the internet as a space of relative freedom, including for stupid aggressive jokes—and offline as a space of relative safety, where one can actually get hit for stupid aggressive jokes. Responsibility for aggression online and impunity for aggression offline are not perceived as the norm. And the only thing we can do to ensure there is less stupid aggression on the internet is to work on the general softening of manners.

An example of stupid aggression from the internet

Containment Doctrine for Omegas

At the beginning of December, someone anonymously sent me a text for editing; I rewrote it beyond recognition, and now it is posted in the public channel Deterrence Doctrine. I didn’t publish it here, but recently in my cozy chat, a long argument broke out due to some vague disputes at a Moscow New Year’s party for decision-makers, and so, I remembered it, which is why I’m posting the text here.

You are being bullied in the workplace—how do you solve the problem? If you don’t intend to run away or kill everyone secretly, then you need to develop a deterrence doctrine—that is, establish a line of behavior that makes the pleasure the group gets from bullying you less than the potential costs of doing so.

The clearest and most powerful measure that avoids open warfare is to gather compromising material on everyone who bullies you, store it in a secure location that allows for quick publication, and then casually let the bullies see samples of the material. From then on, they will hate you exclusively in secret, but will communicate with you in a pointedly neutral manner. In terms of implementation complexity, this is roughly as if you were a state creating a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying each of your potential adversaries.

Making acquaintances with some tough guys from the outside is also a decent measure; however, this will require some communication skills, not just the ability to work with information. In this scenario, they might still huff in your direction, but they will try to keep your irritation below the radar: after all, you are unlikely to incite your support group to step in for you over trivialities. In terms of complexity, this is as if you were a state joining NATO.

The most reliable way is, of course, to bulk up, get experience in sparring, overcome the natural omega-like inability to strike first, and then, in response to another episode of bullying, address the participant who seems like a manageable opponent: something like, “You’re only brave when you’re in a pack, or are you too chicken to go one-on-one?” Essentially, it doesn’t matter who wins the ensuing fight; what matters is that it happens at all, one-on-one, and that you manage to demonstrate a sufficient level of resilience. If you cause significant damage to your opponent, all the better. In terms of complexity, this is as if you were Finland and the Soviet Union was bullying you. Finland, as a reminder, turned out to be the only country that, despite losing to the USSR as a result of World War II, maintained its relative independence, and was actually reckoned with because dealing with this little psycho was more trouble than it was worth.

And finally, if you’re too scared to fight honestly, but the hatred is building and you don’t want to pursue a career as the Joker, then buy some pepper spray, ambush one of the harassers, spray them in the eyes, knock them down, and kick them. Then inform all the others that they can, of course, kill you, but if they don’t and simply continue their bullying, you will get to every single one of them. This is as if you were a country training terrorists, and there were no USA in the world, only the EU.

The general line of thinking is roughly this: you need to demonstrate that you are prepared to exert significant effort and incur significant costs to rid yourself of the bullying, and that you have no intention of simply enduring it and crying into your pillow.

But the best thing is simply to stop being an omega. You won’t be bullied not only if people fear the consequences, but also if you are simply likable and useful to the members of the collective. This is as if you were Japan, exporting anime and Toyota.