Lifeboat Games And Backscratchers Clubs
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I. Lifeboat Games
Ten people are stuck on a lifeboat after their ship sank. It will be weeks before anyone finds them, and they’re out of food.
They’ve heard this story before, so they decide to turn to cannibalism sooner rather than later. They agree to draw lots to determine the victim. Just as the first person is reaching for the lots, Albert shouts out “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT BOB!”
They agree to do this instead of drawing lots. This is obvious, right? For nine out of ten people, it’s a better deal. For nine out of ten people, it brings their chance of death from 1/10 to 0. Bob’s against it, of course, but he’s outvoted. The nine others overpower Bob and eat him.
Something about this surprises me. It’s weird that there’s another solution which is more stable than the fair one of drawing lots. It’s strange that by shouting an obvious suggestion - one that adds no more information - Albert can save his own life with certainty. Still, that’s how it goes.
More weeks go by. They still aren’t rescued. They need another victim. Once again the lots come out. This time, just before the first lot is drawn, nine castaways all simultaneously shout “WAIT LET’S KILL AND EAT ______”, with a different name in the blank for all of them.
This is obvious, right? By being the proposer last time, Albert got 100% chance of avoiding death. Everyone else had post facto 100% chance of avoiding death, since Bob’s name was called instead of theirs. But before Albert called out the name, letting Albert call a name gives you a 1/9 chance of dying (since we know Albert won’t call out his own name). Letting Albert call out the name makes your chances worse, since you’re going from a 1/10 chance (randomly chosen one out of everyone) to a 1/9 chance (randomly chosen one out of everyone except Albert). So the “one person calls out a name” solution beats drawing lots post facto for everyone except the callee, but it’s worse ex ante unless you’re the caller. So everyone tries to be the caller. Since everyone calls out a different random name, nobody can coordinate, and nothing happens.
The castaways agree to take a day to think things over, and try again the next morning.
The next morning, the lots come out. Before anything happens, eight out of nine people call “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT CHARLOTTE”.
Charlotte, you see, is blonde. And everyone else in the raft is dark-haired. Just luck of the draw (hah!) - it so happened that eight dark-haired people and one blonde were stuck on the same lifeboat. There’s no racism or genuine bad feeling between the darks and blondes. Nobody actually cares about hair color. It was just the simplest Schelling point.
(remember, a Schelling point is a solution people choose in the absence of coordination. For example, suppose you were playing a game where you and ten other people you couldn’t talk to would each get $1 million if you guessed the same number out of an array, otherwise nothing. The array is [1, 2, 3, 4, 93850618, 5, 6, 7]. Which number do you choose? 93850618 is the obvious outlier, therefore easiest to coordinate on, so you might choose that number yourself and hope everyone else follows the same thought process.)
This is obvious, right? When everyone calls out a different name, nothing happens, and you’re stuck drawing lots. But if eight of the nine castaways call out the same name, they form a coalition which can easily overpower the one remainder. So the goal is to all converge upon the same coalition of eight against one. If everyone has dark hair except for one blonde, that’s the most salient possible coalition, so it’s the one that’s easiest for other people to converge on, so it’s the one you want to go with yourself. Everyone kills and eats Charlotte.
More weeks go by. Still no rescue. The lots come out again. Just before they get chosen, all eight remaining castaways should “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT ________”, again all naming a different person.
Daniel thinks they should kill and eat Erica, because all the rest of them are Americans, but Erica is Canadian.
Erica thinks they should kill and eat Frank, because all the rest of them are Methodists, but Frank is Episcopalian.
Frank thinks they should kill and eat Greg, because all the rest of them are lower-middle-class, but Greg is upper-middle-class.
Greg thinks they should kill and eat Heather, because all the rest of them work in retail, but Heather works in marketing.
Heather thinks they should kill and eat Iolanthe, because all the rest of them play basketball for fun, but Iolanthe plays soccer.
…and so on.
This is obvious, right? Now that you know you win by choosing a Schelling point, everyone tries to come up with a Schelling point that leaves them personally in the winning coalition. If there were an obvious self-recommending Schelling point, like one of them was a twelve-foot-tall green Martian, there would be no problem. But it seems like the only clear Schelling point was Charlotte’s blonde hair. Everything else is just a bunch of about-equally-compelling stories for who should be coordinated upon.
What happens next isn’t obvious, at least not to me. I still find this story interesting. It makes me wonder how much real-world coalition-building is like this. Consider for example racism. There are supposed justifications for racism - like that such and such a race is inferior, or oppressive, or plotting to kill us. But another justification is just “We’re the majority and they’re the minority, and if we all band together to profit at their expense, it probably goes well for us.” Any coalition of 51%+ can do this. But it’s easier if everybody comes color-coded so there’s one obvious coalition that occurs to everybody and which they can easily check that they’re a part of. And so on to nationalism, religious conflict, political ideology conflict, and so on.
II. Backscratchers Clubs
After many weeks, six surviving castaways are rescued by the Coast Guard. The government decides not to prosecute them for the murder of their fellows, given their desperate circumstances, and they are reintegrated into society. Still, the experience has scarred them, and gotten them thinking along some weird lines.
Daniel goes back to his hometown and founds the Backscratchers Club (cf. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”). The Backscratchers Club has a simple purpose: whenever possible, club members must favor other club members over outsiders. If a member runs a company, they should preferentially hire other members for good positions. If they write for a newspaper, they should write puff pieces about other members and hatchet jobs on non-members. If they’re a politician, they should pass the policies other members want, and ignore their non-member constituents. If they’re just a normal person, they should be friends with the other members and invite them to their cool social events.
Everyone in town joins the Backscratchers Club immediately. This is obvious, right? There’s no downside to being in the club, and the upside is preferential treatment from all existing club members.
(maybe this isn’t obvious in the real world, where there are always transaction costs, and where people could avoid the club out of stubbornness or principle. But Daniel’s hometown is a farm town that cultivates sparkroot, the magic herb that rounds off people’s sharp edges and turns them into perfect economic actors.)
Since everyone is in the club, nobody prefers anyone over anyone else, and the club becomes meaningless, a 100% waste of time.
Erica hears Daniel’s story and decides to try an experiment of her own. She goes back to her hometown and starts the Advanced Backscratchers Club. Its rules are:
Every year, members must give Erica $100 in club dues.
Every February 1st, members must ride a gray horse naked around the tallest hill in town.
Members must wear a silly purple hat all the time.
Members must prefer other members over non-members, just like in Daniel’s club.
Erica figures that Daniel’s plan failed because there was no downside to being in his club. Add some mildly burdensome requirements, and some people will be attracted by the backscratching and join, other people will find the requirements too burdensome and not join, and the club can achieve its purpose. Or, if not, at least she gets $100 from everyone in town.
Here it’s not obvious to me what happens. I can imagine it going one of three ways:
Erica does a bad job promoting the club and the requirements are too burdensome. Maybe a handful of losers who can’t get friends any other way join, or some people who really like silly purple hats (and so don’t find the requirements burdensome). But overall the club has no effect.
Erica does a great job promoting the club. So many people join that you can’t get ahead in town at all without being a member. All the holdouts grumble and join too. We end up in the same degenerate case as with Daniel, except that everyone does some silly rituals and Erica is rich.
Erica does a medium job promoting the club. As the club catches on, the people who are increasing excluded from town life become angry and found the Anti-Backscratchers Coalition. They discriminate against Backscratchers in the same way that Backscratchers discriminate in favor of each other. Some sort of equilibrium is reached.
Frank hears Erica’s story and decides to try an even more promising version. He returns to his own hometown and founds the Orphan Support Club, with the following tenets:
Members must donate $100/year to the Orphan Support Club
Every February 1st, members are invited to the Orphan Support Gala, held on the tallest hill in town.
Members must wear an purple ribbon to support Orphan Awareness at all times.
There’s no, like, rule about this - but surely you would support other people who share your concern about orphans, and not the kind of callous anti-orphan Scrooge who wouldn’t even join an Orphan Support Club.
Frank’s design has a few advantages over Erica’s:
Part of Erica’s problem was getting off the ground. But Frank has a natural early constituency of people who care about orphans.
Another part of Erica’s problem was that once people realized what she was doing, they might feel threatened and resist. But Frank’s organization can always keep a fig leaf of “we’re just nice people who care a lot about orphans”; it takes some connect-the-dots to realize they’re another backscratchers club after all.
And a few disadvantages:
If they’re too nod-nod-wink-wink about it, people might not realize they’re a backscratchers club at all. Some might not join; others might join and not help one another to the best of their abilities.
Probably they need to spend a bit of time helping orphans or at least appearing to do so, or they lose their fig leaf.
In the end, they take over the world. This is obvious, right?
If the lifeboat games sound like racism and nationalism, what do the backscratchers’ clubs sound like? The simpler versions sound sort of like the mutual aid societies and fraternities of the 19th and 20th century - Elks, Rotaries, Freemasons, etc. The more complicated versions sound like cults, religions, and ideologies.
Obviously one reason movements exist is to achieve their stated goal. In The Ideology Is Not The Movement, I talked about a second reason - as a social sorting device. But a third reason - linked to the second - is as cover for a backscratchers club.
III. Orphan Supporters
After the Orphan Support Club take over the world, the remaining castaways are dispirited - maybe they’ve missed their chance to get ahead through weird social engineering schemes. Still, after a while they manage to make the best of their situations.
Greg was a third-rate academic at a low-ranked school. His only advantage was that, through his friendship with Frank, he caught wind of the Orphan Support Club’s growing power a little faster than everyone else. He toned down his normal teaching and research and started aggressively advocating for orphans, accusing the administration and all his office-politics rivals of not taking their problems seriously enough.
Bad-mouthing your bosses usually ends poorly. But the local newspaper had just been taken over by OSC members, and they wrote several articles on how the town’s college was infested with orphan-hating Scrooges, and Greg was the only professor bold enough to stand up to them. And the local City Council had also just turned OSC, and they called in the college administrators and said they wouldn’t get the city funding they wanted unless they changed their orphan-hating ways. And lots of students were OSC too now, and they threatened to switch colleges unless Greg was taken more seriously. Eventually the college administration folded, gave Greg a promotion, and added him to the Board of Trustees - after which everyone stopped bothering them and they became popular again.
Greg remembered the debt he owed, so he spent the rest of his career writing bogus papers demonstrating that orphans were more likely to starve in counties that didn’t have OSC advocates in local government, or in cities that didn’t have OSC journalists in the local newspaper. Next time the OSC City Council members were in a close election, or the OSC newspaper bosses were involved in office politics, they could point to Greg’s studies to demonstrate their worthiness. It was a weird and indirect kind of backscratching - but backscratching it was.
Heather worked at a local nonprofit. She also wished she could get ahead in office politics, but by this point everyone for miles around was an OSC supporter and she couldn’t succeed on that basis alone.
One night she had dinner with her old friend Erica. “Daniel had this problem too,” Erica said. “He founded the original Backscratchers Club, way back when, but everyone joined it instantly and there was no way to use it to get ahead. My big innovation was adding some ridiculous bylaws that made it costly to get into. That way, only the people who were most committed would join, and we could outcompete everyone else. You should figure out some form of orphan advocacy that works like that.”
The next day, Heather announced that she had figured out a new and important way to support orphans. You could no longer use the word “orphan” metaphorically, to talk about orphan drugs or orphaned ideas; this spiritually harmed real orphans. She engaged in publicity stunts against any writers who spoke this way.
About half of people couldn’t pivot to the new way of using language, or thought it was beneath their honor to dignify this with a response. But the other half - aware that their status relied on being members in good standing of OSC, and aware that any slip in their perceived level of orphan support could ruin their careers - and equally aware that if they seemed to be better OSC members than others, it might give them a step up - enthusiastically joined Heather’s bandwagon. There was a brief internal struggle, which Heather won. She started a new nonprofit to remove anti-orphan terms from language, and remained powerful and respected to the end of her days.
Iolanthe jealously watched Heather’s success, and wanted to do something similar. She announced that she was adopting an orphan, and she believed everyone else should adopt one too. If everyone adopted an orphan, the orphan crisis would be over in no time.
Here’s another case where it’s not obvious to me what happens:
Many other people adopt orphans too. Society enters a new golden age where no child is abandoned, and Iolanthe is celebrated as a hero.
Other people decide this is too much of a sacrifice for a club they only joined to advance their self-interest. They say Iolanthe’s actions were supererogatory, and celebrate her, but don’t follow suit.
Other people decide this is too much of a sacrifice, and see it as a threat; just as Heather’s coalition of orphan-word-not-sayers took power at the expense of its enemies, so Iolanthe’s coalition could do the same, and they would be the losers. They come up with galaxy-brained reasons why adopting orphans actually hurts the orphans, all the OSC-captured institution push these as gospel truth, and parroting these reasons becomes a new sign of OSC membership and value-alignment. Iolanthe is vilified as a “would-be savior” or something.
Overall I would rather be Heather with her word-change campaign than Iolanthe with her adoption campaign.
If the Lifeboat Games seemed suspiciously like nationalism, and the Backscratchers Clubs seemed suspiciously like clubs/cults/ideologies, the stories in this section seem suspiciously like the Establishment - whether it’s the Catholic Establishment of the Middle Ages, the conservative Establishment of mid-20th-century America, or the progressive Establishment of today. Elites support each other not directly - which would be hard to coordinate - but by all supporting the same ideology. If it’s hard for non-elites to break into the ideology, then everyone with the ideology will be elites, and supporting the ideology is an indirect way of elites supporting other elites in a big backscratching network. This is one of the solutions to Class Warfare Having A Free Rider Problem.
I’m sure real sociologists have written about these issues, but it was hard to find them and I figured I might as well write this post without citations. Still, if you know who they are and what their terms are, let me know.