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Equipped & ready.

growing up is funny because it makes you realize in retrospect just how unnecessarily cruel adults were to you in childhood. like damn, i'm an adult now and i could never be such a horrible person to a little kid

🚨 China's Real Estate Market has erased all gains from the last 20 years

autistically deriving etiquette from first principles, and why conservatives are right about multiculturalism: a high trust society is an orderly society where social norms rather than laws are the primary mechanisms used to maintain that order; a society where the equilibrium is cooperate/cooperate, but at scale. this is, of course, harder to maintain the greater the scale. high trust requires punishing defection reliably and doing what you can to make cooperation easy and defection visible. for example: queueing is excellent high trust technology, especially in a large community where not everyone knows everyone else. they makes defection visible both on the part of the clerk (or whatever) and on the parts of the people waiting in line, and they create a clear ordering system that makes it trivial for the clerk to behave fairly without making errors. the easiest way to have a high trust society of course is to keep it extremely small so everyone knows each other. this makes cooperation easier and defection very, very visible! but living with more people has a lot of upsides and in some sense is unavoidable (We Live in a Society). luckily you can still have your high trust society if everyone shares basically the same culture (that is: values, norms, social behaviors, etc. not just recipes). this isn't quite a tautology; same culture gets you halfway there but doesn't necessarily get you "orderly." the issue with scale is of course that you can't maintain a high trust culture past some threshold of low trust participants. put differently, you're in a kind of mass prisoner's dilemma and the game can only support so many people pursuing a strategy of defection before cooperation is no longer viable. having the same culture makes this significantly easier! but multiculturalism has a lot of upsides and in some sense is unavoidable (if you pile enough people into one place for long enough, they're going to start splintering). luckily you can still have your high trust society if everyone else is expected to assimilate to it, the important bit here being that they don't get a free pass for defection, for taking advantage of trust. what i mean is things like: someone who ignores queues in a high-trust queueing society has to be directed to the back of the line, rather than shrugged at and served anyway, or the whole equilibrium begins to break down. a high-trust society can support parallel cultures with their own rules, but those rules absolutely can't be imposed on the dominant culture (in addition to not giving the minory culture's members a free defection pass). there are two major aspects to keeping a cooperate/cooperate equilibrium running smoothly. everyone has to actually cooperate, obviously. and everyone has to believe that everyone else will cooperate. it's sort of unclear exactly which norms and rules (and which combinations of these) are important to maintaining a high trust society, but in some sense even arbitrary ones are useful because they give people opportunities to signal that willingness to cooperate. queues are, as i keep saying, excellent technology. this is because they are *orderly*, but also because they're an opportunity to signal cooperation even when order isn't required (like when there are only two people waiting for service). politeness, abritrary cultural practices, the whole thing is a dance with easy to follow rules that allow people to credibly signal trustworthiness and good will to each other to minimize confusion and maximize cooperation. ritual is load-bearing technology