Or, I suppose, go on thinking this time is different.

I believe that would enable you to identify more or less corrupt industries.

Unfortunately, both stakes and information costs make governance prone to abuse. To see why it’s not nearly as corrupt as one might expect from this model, you’d need reputation cost and benefit, where trusted governments and leaders attract higher functioning citizens and industries.

In a company you will want to cultivate this, since interactions within the company are far more frequent than with the outside world.

This would be a simple governance model, and you could predict something like “revolution” when the cost of samurai exceeds their benefit.

Not sure we'll evolutionarily get out of the loop this time.

From 2016 to 2026. That is 10 years for Republicans to realize they are being grifted, scammed, etc... Not sure they will ever be realizing it. Will take another generation. Which I guess is the point, another generation of evolution cycles might break the loop.

so how do you explain the immediate jump from crypto grift straight into AI grift? i'm not saying all crypto or all AI is pure grift, but both of those industries have had higher than average levels of grift, without any skepticism in between them. The NFT crash did not seem to be followed by any period of skepticism at all.

For example, if you need cell phone service, and all the options have converged on requiring binding arbitration, being a skeptic about binding arbitration will not help you.

Maybe more on point, if you want to be an AI skeptic, but are also aware that AI can work, how can you establish a plausible level of skepticism accurately? Laypeople probably can't.

So the rise of grift might also be seen as a sign of the systemic frustration of effective skepticism.

From 1984!

The obvious trick of computing the eigenvectors didn't seem to work (I got 20%/40%/40%, which does not look right) and I'm out of time for this particular nerd snipe.

If you're a Mark (=trusting person) I don't think you can just decide to become a Skeptic.

I admit I skimmed the article and even if I would read more closely I don't think I would understand it better.

I'll use my intuition for how individuals transition between the roles.

Mark -> Skeptic: requires to be have been grifted and possibly having the grift explained by a Skeptic. Or possibly having someone close to you get grifted.

Mark -> Grifter: I'm not sure it's possible, but maybe the corruption pdf posted[0] is a clue.

Skeptic -> Grifter: desillusion about the point of not grifting since everyone else is doing it too. So maybe late stage corruption[0] or just nihilism based on seeing grifts succeed so much.

Skeptic -> Mark: honestly... Shrooms maybe? Or finding and being chosen into a trusting community.

Grifter -> Skeptic: I think realising that you've hurt someone in an unexpectedly harsh way could help this transition. Otherwise I don't really know besides being short of Marks.

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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47177186