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HUMAN_NATURE

                                         June     26, 2006
                                         December 29, 2009

It is human nature to make
gross generalizations about       For example, utopian dreams of
human nature.                     collaborative, consensus-based
                                  societies are often dismissed
                                  as being "against human nature".
   Here's my generalization:

   The nature of humanity
   depends on the kind of
   humans you have.

The implications of this stunning
observation is that there're no
absolute principle you can cite
about the need for explicit rules,
and/or centralized authority.


           Let me tell you a story about two
           households, group living situations
           with a half-dozen or more un-related
           people living together.


  In one house, they've felt          In another house, they
  the need to implement a             haven't bothered with this.
  regimented, rotating schedule       People seem to automatically
  of dishwashing, complete with       wash their own dishes, and
  penalties for skipping your         occasionally volunteer to
  turn.                               wash other people's dishes
                                      without being prodded, and
                                      without fear that they're
                                      being taken advantage of by
                                      free-loaders.



       The difference between these two
       households may simply be that there
       are different people living there,      Though it could be
       and one group works together more       that there was a
       smoothly than the other.                difference in the
                                               social process by
                                               which the two were
                                               set-up:

                                            The second household may have
           It might be that the             grown at a slower pace: new
           first household is               members could be gradually
           living under unnecessary         socialized into their
           restrictions that were           cooperative system without
           designed to deal with            making a big deal of the
           some problem cases that          indoctrination process.
           are long gone.





It used to seem to me that there were
probable size limits, measurable
boundaries that depend on scale:

    In small groups of people it's at least
    possible to get "communal" arrangements
    to work smoothly, but as the size grows
    it becomes statistically likely that
    these arrangements will break down.

I'm no longer sure that
this is precisely true.

It could be that the cutoff
for "communal breakdown" is
itself a parameter that
varies between different
cultures.

   If you expect it to happen,
   it becomes more likely
   it will happen.


   And rules themselves have
   their limits... a rule with
   no enforcement mechanism
   outside of the official
   ones, a rule without moral
   sanction, a rule whose
   rightness no one implicitly
   believes in... that becomes
   a very weak rule.

     When obeying the spirit of the law
     becomes a joke, then the letter of
     the law becomes irrelevant.



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