'Stephanie Clifford, reporting for The New York Times, described how the incentive system works at Pret: "When employees are promoted or pass training milestones, they receive at least £50 in vouchers, a payment that Pret calls a 'shooting star,' but instead of keeping the bonus, the employees must give the money to colleagues, people who have helped them along the way." To install Pret's incentive system in the academy would be to blow it up. What if when students got gold stars on ClassDojo they didn't keep them, but rather gave them out to other students who helped them along the way? No longer would students be motivated solely to perform the best--they would be motivated to help their classmates. This motivational system is the beginning of community-directed learning.' -- Marksism

'"It's not that the upper classes are coldhearted," said UC Berkeley social psychologist Jennifer Stellar, lead author of the study published online on Dec. 12 in the journal, Emotion. "They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven't had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives." Stellar and her colleagues' findings challenge previous studies that have characterized lower-class people as being more prone to anxiety and hostility in the face of adversity. "These latest results indicate that there's a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be born out of threats to their wellbeing," Stellar said.'

But who will re-regulate the roads?!?!?!

'Every organization and company is a tribe, or a network of tribes-groups of 20 to 150 people that form naturally, in which everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows of them.' -- The same person displays different stage behaviours in different tribes and contexts. -- #Stage Four (We're great/Triadic): Values (authentic) drive activities/relationships. Spontaneous match-making having assumed shared values. -- Lower stages, shared values can't be assumed. -- #Stage Five (Life is great): A common enemy 'them' takes the form of an abstraction rather than another tribe. Hard to benchmark. Visit don't stay. -- Don't just hire best and brightest else you will stagnate at Stage Three. - #Stage Three (I'm great/Dyadic): Endless cloning/individuation cycles. Values have to be made explicit before attempting match. @44:05 See tribe stage types in social network map. Hub-and-spokes meshed using triadic connections. -- Rhetoric: Shift up stages with deliberative; stabilize with demonstrative.

'The psychogenic theory of evolution is based not upon Spencer and Darwin's "survival of the fittest" products of the most ruthless parents but upon the "survival of the most innovative and cooperative" products of the most loving parents. The processes of historical evolution, based upon the very slow growth of love and cooperation, are therefore the exact opposite from those of neo-Darwinian natural selection, based overwhelmingly upon conflict and competition. They include: #1. The production of variations through psychogenesis is by creating through more love different early epigenetic environments – more advanced fetal and early childhood developmental paths – not through random genetic mutations and recombinations i.e., through variations in the structures of neuronal groups achieved during post-genetic development after inception, not through mutations in DNA prior to inception...'

'The various systems of government used in the ISDG masks a deeper conflict about whether teams are playing just to have fun, or to establish their supremacy of the game. Each team realises that the reputation of their entire website – in some cases, numbering in the tens of thousands – rests on their quality of playing, which requires a certain discipline that precludes any messing about. ‘Diplomacy on crack’ is one way to describe the ISDG... The combination of a highly complex strategy game with hundreds of players defies normal categorization into the normal genres of MMORPGs or simulation games like Everquest or SimCity. Even experienced Civilization players find the concept of the ISDG alien, since the delay between turns adds such a bewildering array of negotiation, debate and power politics that aren’t seen in normal games. To win the ISDG, a team will have to perfectly balance conflict and co-operation, not only with other teams but between its own members.'

'A democracy game is just like a normal single player game of Civilization, except with over a hundred people sitting beside you arguing about what to do. The Intersite Democracy Game takes the concept one step further by involving eight website teams scattered across the globe. Over three hundred players are spread among the teams, many of whom have played Civilization for over ten years and possess an enormous ... amount of knowledge about the game. Each team represents one civilization within the game. The ISDG revolves around savegames. It’s when a savegame arrives that teams can get down to the serious business of actually moving units around and issuing orders instead of just talking about it. Teams wait for savegames in the same way that children wait for Christmas ... Any delay in their arrival, usually caused by email problems, or (as is suspected occasionally) nefarious behind the scenes diplomacy, is a source of immense distress and rampant speculation for players.'

'The next time you feel angry at a friend who has let you down, or grateful toward one whose generosity has surprised you, consider this: you may really be bargaining for better treatment from that person in the future. According to a controversial new theory, our emotions have evolved as tools to manipulate others into cooperating with us. -- You get angry not when someone hurts you, but when their actions betray a setting of their cooperation dial that is lower than you expect, and your anger is both a threat to turn down your own dial and an inducement to them to turn theirs up. You show gratitude not when someone benefits you, but when their dial is set higher than you expect, and this signals that you plan to turn yours up in response.'

'“The selfish gain on the altruistic, but once in a while, the groups composed of selfish guys get clobbered in competition with groups that have altruistic individuals.” Asked whether the willingness to participate in battle might be taken for fear of within-group punishment, Bowles said that merely “displaced the question.” “I might hope that someone would punish you, but why should I do it? You might hit back. The idea that I can exert order on you presupposes the idea that someone is altruistic.”' -- Survival of the witness. (My public selflessness is self-interested since it enhances my social status; my private selflessness is self-interested since it enhances my self-esteem.)

'Fowler and Christakis suggest that people tend to mimic the actions of those they played with. They could be directly imitating the actions of other players, or they could be looking out for cues that tell them the 'right' or 'normal' way of behaving. Whether it's specific actions or social norms that are spreading, the result is the same - a ripple effect that causes groups of people to act in similar ways. In this way, small changes could spread throughout an entire group. Fowler and Christakis claim that "social contagion... may play an important role in the evolution of cooperation" since these ripples of behaviour would encourage members of a community to behave similarly to each other, a scenario that fosters cooperation. -- ...they repeatedly acknowledge that both cooperative acts and selfish ones can spread throughout a group.'

'Money is at the intersection of nearly every aspect of modern life. Most of us take the monetary system for granted, but it has a profound and largely misunderstood influence on our lives. THE MONEY FIX is a feature-length documentary exploring our society’s relationship with the almighty dollar. THE MONEY FIX examines economic patterning in both the human and the natural worlds, and through this lens we learn how we can empower ourselves by redesigning the lifeblood of the economy at the community level. The film documents three types of alternative money systems, all of which help solve economic problems for the communities in which they operate.' -- Good stuff.

'Coopetition is a term that encompasses how rivals can compete for market share but cooperate to grow the market and speed up combined growth. In commercial coopetition, this is done by rivals sharing common platforms (a very important concept) that enable them to reduce costs (as in firms that share suppliers), widen variety, increase flexibility, etc. For example, coopetition is the basis for Internet standards and the Web. Vertical integration is an anathema to successful coopetition.'

Comment: tim302: 'Internally, there are a couple of issues [with MMOs]: #1. Drawbacks of tribal/fictive kinship relationships #2. Getting buy-in to tribal/fictive kinship relationships by typical western consumerist people. -- ...the level of invasiveness [in kinship societies] can be high since everyone is in your business. The running mental balance sheet [of grudges and obligations] is the thing that people in kinship/fictive kinship organizations use to know where they stand in relationship to others. The drawback is that the complexity of these relationships can become so great that people are afraid to do anything for fear of incurring a debt to someone else that can never be repaid. Any MMO based tribe is going to have to have a filtering system to filter out those who aren't interested in developing fictive-kinship relationships. More importantly, it should have a system to train your typical [consumerist] to understand and value the fictive-kinship based obligation system.'

'#1. Unoccupied play: the child is relatively stationary and appears to be performing random movements with no apparent purpose. A relatively infrequent style of play. #2. Solitary play: the child is are completely engrossed in playing and does not seem to notice other children. Most often seen in children between 2 and 3 years-old. #3. Onlooker play: child takes an interest in other children's play but does not join in. May ask questions or just talk to other children, but the main activity is simply to watch. #4. Parallel play: the child mimics other children's play but doesn't actively engage with them. For example they may use the same toy. #5. Associative play: now more interested in each other than the toys they are using. This is the first category that involves strong social interaction between the children while they play. #6. Cooperative play: some organisation enters children's play, for example the playing has some goal and children often adopt roles and act as a group.'

Nice reveal on populist/socialist/price-fixing tendencies during times of distress: '...pro-cooperation instincts rely on dangerous conformity. For example, in big disasters like hurricanes, certain goods like gas, wood, water, or food become especially valuable. While natural selfish reactions lead to higher prices for these key items, humans clearly evolved to see this behavior as uncooperative; we resist such price rises, and want to punish those who allow them. Perhaps this made sense for our distant ancestors, but today it is counter-productive. If these goods are not allocated by price, they will instead be allocated by standing in lines, personal connections, etc., processes that are consistently worse at giving goods to those who value them the most, and do worse at creating incentives to prepare for such scenarios. But even when some of us realize that disaster price rises are actually cooperative behavior, pro-”cooperation” instincts get in the way of acting on this insight.'

'Four key conditions for the successful management of shared environmental resources: #information, #identity, #institutions and #incentives ...introducing a system of policing simply creates a second-order free-rider problem - raising the issue of who guards the guards. The key is trust - and the cornerstone for building trust is fairness. ...local water authorities tried to implement drastic water-saving measures... Residents were most likely to comply with authorities if they felt their concerns were taken seriously and they got accurate, unbiased information about the severity of the drought ...the more uncertain we are the more likely we are to bias our decisions in our own narrow self-interest ...the environmental uncertainty caused by a fluctuating resource led individuals to underestimate the damage of their actions and exploit the resource to the point of collapse.'

Like the meaning of life being 'life', I think he's nailed the "what does twitter mean?" thing, here: '#1. Ideals beat strategies: What infuriates people most about Twitter is that it seems to have no plan, scheme, or angle. "Hey, Twitter" say the pundits: "don't you know the business of business is to profit, by any means necessary?" The business of business is to create value — and that's why Twitter's not playing the tired, old game of value extraction. It is trying, instead, to create a more authentic kind of value — and to do that, you need ideals. Twitter pursues its ideals — democracy, peace, equity — with the quiet intensity of a true revolutionary.' -- '#2. Open beats closed. #3. Connection beats transaction. #4. Simplicity beats complexity. #5. Neighborhoods beat networks. #6. Circuits beat channels. #7. Laziness beats business. #8. Public beats private. #9. Messy beats clean. #10. Good beats evil.'

Clay Shirky: 'In a curious way, this proposition exceeds the socialist promise of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" because it betters what you contribute and delivers more than you need.' -- 'The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can. ...the leaders of the new socialism are extremely pragmatic. A survey of 2,784 open source developers explored their motivations. The most common was "to learn and develop new skills." That's practical. One academic put it this way: The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software.' -- If (potatoes && power) {1. Social Capital [via status] 2. Financial Capital [via incentives] 3. ???? 4. PROFIT! [via capitalism]}