100. Risk Larping 🔗

The fewer risks you take, the easier it is to be judgmental.

2 sub-cases:

Standard: Somebody takes a risk you won’t and fails

Special: You take what you think is a risk but isn’t really a risk for you, but others don’t because it’s actually a serious risk for them

Yes, if you take real risks. But if you take fake risks thinking they’re real, it makes you more judgmental not less, per special case above. Especially common with a certain kind of entrepreneur tweet^[1]

There’s some sort of generalization of moral hazard here. Judgmental attitudes are appropriate when people try to socialize losses and privatize gains, reshaping their risk/return curved stealthily. But the core instinct to punish that kind of risk-cheating easily metastasizes.

Positive judgment seems to work better. When people take risks where upside is easily socialized (and hard to privatize) and losses are easily privatized, society seems to correctly esteem the results. It’s negative judgment that goes wrong.

Society seems to work on a portfolio effect where our collective risk-taking (per capita) is much higher than individual risk tolerances, with generally positive effects, but the dissonance distorts judgments.

“I’m nobly and selflessly advancing society with my martyr-level risks, you’re free-riding and socializing your costs, he’s a rent-seeking bond-villain.”

Everybody understates the risks they’re dumping on others, overstates the positive externalities and spillovers.

This is true whether you’re an entrepreneur, a soldier, or a social worker. Nobody can see the societal risk surface, everybody is doing the blind-men-and-elephant judgment thing.

At best you see the patch of the risk surface you’re disproportionately exposed to, and miss the patch of invisible socialized benefits you’re free-riding.

And you clearly see the villainy of your shadow/evil-twin’s choices. You would never make such morally corrupt choices.

This argument has merit but tends to be overstated. I know enough poorer/wrong-side-of-tracks entrepreneurs to be cautious about it. BUT, even the poorer ones often have strong advantages they understate. tweet^[2]

The most dangerous judgmental types are the ones for whom “do nothing off script” happens to be an exceptionally sweet bet. Ie the system’s defaults fit you well enough that you develop the illusion that all active risk-taking/script-breaking is irresponsible societal vandalism.

This is a wider net than you might think, since it includes all scripts, including scripts nominally devoted to change and progress rather than preservation. They may even work. It’s just that they work so slowly, and are so stable across generations, there are scripts for them.

A social justice mission that might slowly make the world fairer over decades (socialism) or centuries (Christianity, Islam) will induce scripts you can follow blindly.

Ditto economic development scripts that work for decades. “Silicon Valley” is 3 generations old already.

And scripts often position themselves as breaks from other scripts. But they’re scripts nevertheless. If it can be parodied, it’s a script. Even if it’s too young to have acquired multiple generations. And if it’s a script, it’s distorting your view of civilizational risks.

Being parodied and anomie are the 2 strong push-pull signals that can keep you ahead of maturing scripts. Though that’s no guarantee that your distortions will weaken. But being captured by scripts is a guarantee that your distortions will harden into judgmentalism.

It would be interesting to actually model the portfolio effect somehow. If you had 100 people with say n entrepreneurs, m social workers, p investigative journalists, q frontline first respondents, r soldiers, s homeless people etc, what does the net civ risk profile look like?

It’s hard to think of a societal role, however apparently lowly, that doesn’t contribute to the net risk reward function. There are no true NPCs.

Even people who seem obviously beyond the pale, like people building uninsurable homes in floodplains/hurricane zones/fire boundaries and expecting bailouts post-disaster, are helping learn the global risk function. Though it’s admittedly hard to be sympathetic.

Do you know in what ways you are building on a flood plain? Is for eg. all of academia a flood plain? Is making art and expecting Patreon/NFT income that different from building in a hurricane zone and expecting FEMA bailout? Super easy to rationalize your thing as prosocial.

I can’t actually think of a single unambiguous risk you can take that moves you from free-rider column over to net-societal-surplus column in an expected-value sense (ie regardless of outcome). Nobody deserves either zero benefit of doubt or uncritical admiration for their risks.

Fun thought. If we got rid of all government and did all redistribution through GoFundMe, perhaps our global risk-reward function would be a lot clearer. Impractical, like direct democracy, but revealing as a thought experiment.

A hypothesis I am comfortable venturing: human risk-tolerance range is far narrower than it looks, and to first order, is the same for all humans. All differences are a function of context, subjective factors, and path-dependent mitigating conditioning.

The main thing that changes risk tolerance is actually taking risks. Which progressively drives your perception of risks away from that of others. Divergence strikes again. Which might be why not taking risks makes you judgmental. You increasingly can’t fathom the divergence.

Test: if you take a real risk, your ideology will inevitably shift a little. If your ideology isn’t moving, you’re not actually taking risks.

I think I just figured out precisely why I really distrust strong-halo charismatic derp. People who preach an unchanging gospel for a long period are taking no real risks and never breaking from scripts. It’s a kind of degen ideological yield farming.

Converse not necessarily true. Ideological drift is necessary but not sufficient to conclude continuous risk-taking is going on. tweet^[3]