Ways to be More Cooperative in Everyday Life

Note

Ozzie Gooen · March 2025 · Completeness: ★★☆ (developing)

Unpublished QURI draft, posted as-is — rough and unfinished; collaborator comments have been removed.

Ozzie Gooen’s take

I think cooperation deserves more attention; a lot of altruism is arguably cooperation in disguise. Very few people seem to appreciate this, but when I try to describe it, it all sounds obvious in a way I’d expect to leave readers underwhelmed. Much of the challenge of writing about it is in the phrasing and packaging.

Opus 4.8’s summary

A draft (March 2025) treating everyday prosocial behavior as a set of strategic games in which being seen as cooperative can diverge from being cooperative. After a short high-level framing, it covers academia (vocabulary and citation incentives) and then devotes most of its length to social media: bragging, giving compliments and feedback, and an extended analysis of online debates as status contests, including “debate baiting,” response-in-kind proportionality, tribal dynamics, likes-as-weapons, and exit strategies. It closes with shorter sections sketching a general “conflict games” model and the thesis that much of what people call morality is really coordination. The draft is in bullet-list note form throughout, and the final sections (“Conflict Games,” “Cooperation”) are looser and less developed than the social-media material.

High-Level

• Reality vs. Perception
  • Generally, these are correlated. But there are exceptions!
  • Lots of people want to be seen as cooperative. It can be much less valuable to actually be cooperative. There are some areas where discrepancies between the actual and the perceived can come into conflict.
    • For example, say that a person realized that their social group is making a significant mistake. If they argue against it, they know that it would be assumed they are arguing because they are trying to attack the group. In this case, they could be more liked but less useful by staying silent.
  • Caring a lot about actually being cooperative, can ironically be seen as uncooperative. The reason is that pointing out the discrepancy might be hurtful to people who are taking advantage of the discrepancy. While this might be useful to the group in the long run, it will hurt some players in the short-run.

Academia

• Vocabulary
  • It’s generally considered more prosocial to use the terminology/vocabulary that has been previously used.
    • At the same time, this can quickly lead to conflicts between what certain intellectuals want, and what your audience wants. One specific intellectual might prefer it if you use their terminology, but your audience might find this terminology confusing.
  • It’s arguably more selfish to name terminology after yourself, or to name it under something that your community will find easy, but other communities will find hard.
  • Vocabulary presents a lot of work. Learning new vocabulary/jargon is very work-intensive. Also, different jargon is optimized for different use cases.
• Citations
  • It’s obviously considered good practice to give credit to others who have done similar work. If others came up with the key ideas or causally led to the work, that’s particularly important to flag.
  • Obviously, (a) leads to situations where one is incentivized to cite certain work, at the expense of other readers. For example, one person might hype up the work of a colleague that’s expected to reciprocate, but such hype distorts the beliefs of readers.

Social Media

• On Bragging / Positive Personal Information
  • Be careful of bragging, intentionally or not. It can be easy to create disvalue here. Lots of people compare themselves with others in harmful ways - when they see others succeeding, they feel worse about themselves.
  • This includes obvious humble brags “I feel so humbled as to have received X award.” It also includes a lot of information that hints at success - like vacation photos, fancy food pictures, pictures that show social success.
  • Arguably “writing smart posts” itself does involve “signaling competence” and can have negative effects.
  • Having a positive bias can also mislead people’s beliefs.
  • Generally, people like hearing positive updates for people that are
    • Underdogs
    • Helpful to them (i.e. your spouse does better, in ways that are likely to help with your own success/popularity)
• Providing complements
  • People generally like receiving positive comments. A lot of people are bad at providing these.
  • Being able to empathize and appreciate people, then vocalize that to them, is a hard skill and task for many people, especially people who are doing well or who are very smart. But it’s probably good to do at the margin.
  • Positive public comments can leak into the issue of (1). If you give someone a positive comment, but a lot of readers regard that person as a competitor to them in some form, that could produce a net loss.
• Providing feedback
  • When feedback is sensitive, it’s good to send it as private messages, instead of publicly.
  • If you have uncomfortable but important information, it can be very useful to share it, even if this might be difficult for you. Kim Scott’s book on Radical Candor is useful here. It can be very easy to fall into the zone of “Ruinous Empathy”.
• Debates/battles
  • It can be easy to get into debates/battles in comments. I think of this as a distinct mini-game to have. I think these quickly get into incentives outside of [honestly getting at the truth]. Instead, this quickly can turn into a fairly zero-sum game. Like:
    • One person in the debate will come out as more trustworthy/impressive, and others will come out as less trustworthy/impressive. It’s a lot like a conventional physical fight.
    • Debate helps create some sort of intellectual pecking-order. Like, if one is used to failing at semi-public debates with certain individuals, they will stop attempting them. Winners gradually “upgrade” to going against more prestigious opponents.
    • The more a debate gets heated, the higher risk it can become. If it’s semi-public, it’s very easy for parties to do things that will harm themselves. Like, make a comment that winds up reflecting poorly on themselves.
    • Humans seem to enjoy playing games with each other, and debating can act as a clear game. There are rules, challenges, and winners.
    • Obviously, debates follow different rules and scoring procedures than honest truth finding.
    • This seems highly analogous to fights between [animals/humans] for dominance.
  • Debates can quickly become about power.
    • People can challenge the claims of others, which can be equivalent to exclaiming, “I want to do intellectual battle with you. I’d like to start on this topic, where I think I have an advantage.”
    • The result can be that one person gains power and another loses power.
    • Debates happen if:
      • If one person thinks another is both [more powerful than they think is reasonable]
      • One person thinks another is vulnerable to a debate conflict. I.e. would do poorly
      • One person thinks that they will do better. This doesn’t have to just be about social recognition - it can even be internalized, as personal ego. You’re impressing yourself, similar to the feeling that comes from winning a board game with no one else watching.
    • Intellectual power is arguably nuanced. Specific people arguably have different levels of intellectual power on very specific topics/claims. As such, an attacker could be pushing back against the combination of person x claim, instead of that person on the whole.
  • The fact that intellectual debates affect power can make truth seeking very difficult.
    • For example, if you just want to correct a point on X, but aren’t trying to damage the reputation of people who claim X, it can be very difficult to signal this. The flip side of this is that if you are trying to hurt their reputation, then you can be very sneaky by claiming you only care about claim X. So it’s very hard to trust people on this, and correspondingly hard to signal good faith.
  • One very positive thing about debates is that it motivates intellectual discussion.
    • Two people might be having a status fight with each other - but the output could be a long list of interesting insights that are useful to third parties. It can be difficult to motivate people to produce any useful intellectual work, having them get into intellectual debates can be an effective (though sometimes deceptive) strategy.
  • Debates aren’t inherently bad. They can be quite useful on the whole. But their downsides and characteristics should be understood.
    • It can be very useful for the public/friends to have a decent idea of what the intellectual pecking-order is. This won’t match the truth, but will generally correlate with it.
  • One unspoken rule of debate is that “the person who fails to reply, thinks that their position is weak”
    • This provides significant fuel and incentives to these debates.
    • This also means that if one person makes a provocative point on someone else’s post, then they are setting up the incentive such that that person is incentivized to respond. If they don’t, that can be seen as them admitting defeat/agreement.
      • I call this “debate baiting”. As with other things here, what’s going on is rarely explicitly stated (“I’m challenging you to a debate”), which makes it difficult to discuss.
    • The sunk cost fallacy makes things worse. If you’ve spent 3 years debating intellectually, it’s significantly more awkward to end the debate.
  • On different platforms, the rules of debate are very different.
  • “Debate Exits”
    • There are some clever strategies to get out of debates while not taking a status hit.
    • Some of these strategies could make both participants look good.
    • One nice thing about this is that it’s possible to convert a “heated debate” into a more “truth-aligned conversation.”
      • One example: You take a clearly cooperative action, then argue you’d like to exit.
        • The combat example of this is, “You have a clear window to make an attack on your opponent. But instead of doing so, you back out, out of clear concern for the welfare of your opponent.”
        • In online debate, this could look like showing a lot of respect for your opponent, declining to make personal attacks. This can reframe things from “a zero-sum debate minigame” to a much more positive-sum minigame.
        • When you do this, the other side could decide to cooperate with that, or defect. Generally, if both parties really want to get out of the debate mini-game, there are often ways to do that.
  • Debates around Tribal issues
    • If you’re debating on the side of a tribal issue, then you’re representing the tribe. The visibly prosocial thing to help your tribe is for you to “perform well.” So it can be particularly valuable for you to “look good”, and in some cases, to make the other side “look bad.”
      • Note that “being prosocial” here means “people around you clearly will benefit, which in turn means that they will reward you for that favor.
  • There’s often an understanding that mediums should be attacked in kind.
    • Examples:
      • Funny memes vs. funny memes
      • Rap diss tracks vs. rap diss tracks
      • Clever tweets vs. similarly clever tweets
      • Academic essays vs. academic essays
      • Interpretive dance vs. interpretive dance
      • Sets of statistics vs. sets of statistics
    • For those examples, consider the weirdness of attacking someone using a different medium, to respond to an attack. Use an academic essay to respond to a Tweet. Or use a rap diss track to respond to a Reddit meme. Use a postmodern philosophy paper to respond to a statistics argument.
    • Obviously, when there’s a meme war going on, a lot of the way to win is by being clever and funny - not by being correct. So, different formats feature very different alignment of [participant success] vs. [one side being correct].
    • Perhaps there’s some sense of proportionality - it’s seen as weird if you respond with a very different scale of an effort than was brought on you. Going too high-effort seems off; it’s easy for this to accidentally signal “I think your stance is quite good, so I need to spend a whole lot of time addressing it.”
      • Also, maybe this is considered uncooperative. Like, “I’m shifting this fight from one where each response takes 5 minutes, to one where each response takes 5 hours. As such, I’m making it more difficult for both of us, in a way largely considered as unfair. The other side didn’t agree to this escalation and likely would reject it.”
    • This weirdness (the importance of responding in kind) highlights that these battles are less about truth seeking, and more reflect some game.
    • In comedy, they often say that the first key challenge is to be liked. I think this is also true with a lot of debates. If you come off as mean, that will become the most interesting aspect of the debate for listeners, and this can greatly hurt you. Similarly, if you come off as weak (even in stupid ways, like, “you’re just physically smelly”), then that could greatly hurt you. It really is a popularity contest of a certain kind.
  • An implied standard of winning/defeat is, “Are you successfully able to convince your opponent?”
    • This is clearly unreasonable. “Being convinced” often means “losing status.”
  • These battles are happening on very different scales
    • Examples
      • Direct, 1-time conflicts between two people, for 5 minutes.
      • Prolonged disagreements. Say there are two sides of a long-standing corporate argument.
      • Prolonged international disagreements. See extended Twitter spats between liberals and conservatives, for instance.
        • Arguably these follow a lot of the same rules of intellectual battles that I mention above.
    • Community-wide debates are in some ways equivalent to large-scale warfare
      • Both communities are now in a power struggle. Wins by one are losses for the other. Much of these wins/losses are in power/prestige, not in concrete arguments.
      • Status among communities is a real thing.
        • If one Mormon is great on Twitter at making strong sarcastic memes in support of Mormonism, this will grow the status of Mormonism around that extended Twitter community. People will associate all of Mormonism, a bit more, with [people on Twitter who demonstrate competence, in this case with Twitter memers].
      • Likes/reactions act as weapons in the fight.
        • It’s useful for a person on one side of a large debate to upvote/heart all the content that supports their side.
        • Given there are so few signals of how an online debate are going, people pay extra attention to the ones that exist. Like/heart counts are prominently shown and are adjustable, so people will use these to help their side.
        • Obviously, this raises the importance for platforms to provide signals that correlate with correctness and value.
      • The situation generally is highly analogous to sports communities. In these situations, communities go up and down in status with each other based on how well their respective sports teams do. A Yankees fan will feel superior to a Dodgers fan, when the Yankees win.
      • It’s often useful to bring in people to support your side.
        • This means that participants are incentivized to bring in more participants.
        • This means that it’s seen as prosocial to participate on one side of these. It is prosocial, at least to one side of a fight.
      • Tribalistic affiliations often become a major part of people’s identities
        • This can be very prosocial (to a tribe).
        • When one strongly publicly identifies with one side of a fight, they are publicly committing to feel very good when that side wins, and very bad when that side loses. This correspondingly means that they will be much more incentivized to support this side. This is clearly positive to people on that side.
        • It’s not clear what other things there are to impact one’s personality, besides this sort of tribalism.
          • Arguably people would try to identify with generic measures of success, but this is a competitive game that typically requires expensive signals. Lots of people would love to be known for being successful, but this obviously is very limited. “Being successful” is fairly zero-sum - only a few people can be “more successful than average”, or be “seen as more successful than average.”
        • There’s an interesting game of people choosing the tribes (and dedication levels) in ways that are maximally advantageous to them. Arguably, people are good at generally doing what’s the most convenient.
          • People will often choose tribes such that their personal success/status is maximized. You have status in the tribe, and the tribe has status outside of the tribe.
            • For example, there’s a trade-off between “high status in a low-status tribe” vs. “low status in a high-status tribe.”
  • Convenience
    • People rarely want to engage in this sort of analysis.
      • When describing one’s intentions, it’s often the most personally beneficial to argue that one’s incentives are as prosocial and positive as possible.
      • Given that it’s incredibly hard to verify anyone’s stated reasons for doing things as either true or false, these are incredibly easy to lie about.
        • There are cultural standards of “claiming that one’s reasons for most of their actions are highly altruistic.” I suspect that a lot of this is dishonest or false. But this leaves honest people in an awkward position. If they correctly state “My own reasons are based highly on my personal benefit.” they could easily be seen, in comparison to others, as utterly contemptible, given that everyone else seems to altruistic.
      • I suspect that a great deal of people involved in debate will use generally lines like:
        • “I care so much about the honest truth.”
        • “I think that Person X (who I’m debating) is wrong, and I’m trying to help them fix their mistake.”
      • Because debates can quickly become tribal, if one player is honest about their intentions in a way that looks bad for them, it would correspondingly hurt their greater community. The locally-prosocial thing can be to be incredibly dishonest.
        • This also means that [being dishonest to favor one’s group] can quickly be a costly (and thus significant) signal of group allegiance.
        • Similar applies for other personally-harmful things. Like, doing things generally seen as cruel, for the sake of the collective. (Assuming that “being cruel” often comes with negative status)

Conflict, a Theory, Before and After -> “Conflict Games?”

There’s a very frequent pattern that happens that can be simply described by:

• There are two parties.
• Both have some ability to trigger a conflict.
• The conflict is typically net-negative in expectation and risky for both.
• This means that both of them get some bargaining power. They could both initiate a conflict if they need to.
• There’s then things like the “madman theory” - that one should seem irrational in order to essentially precommit to conflict, forcing the other’s hand more often.
• There’s often a power struggle, over the question “who can cause the more harm to the other”, even if this harm isn’t actualized. The party with the greatest ability to cause harm, and the least personal risk, is the one with the greater power.

Examples:

• Animals will occasionally fight each other. Even when they’re not fighting, the potential of them to fight is significant.
• Relatives will fight with each other from time to time. This is often not physically violent, but still damaging.
• Bullies and such work this way.
• Police manage large populations. There’s a risk of being caught and punished. But ideally, the police don’t want to spend many resources punishing many people.

Cooperation

Interesting examples of coordination of one group, at expense of that group coordinating with another.

• A worker helps to their union
• A family member increases the prestige of their family
• A mediocre bureacrat stays silent on ways their colleagues cheat the system
• A warrior helps their tribe
• A parent puts a lot of resources into their child. Later, the child helps them. The child also makes them look good to their friends.

There are also interesting ways in which groups sometimes coordinate with each other

And villains often do better with coordination

• The trope of evil people making contracts and that they don’t break. Obviously, them being honest matters to them. Or “A Lannister always pays his debts.”

Group loyalty is a major thing, and has large ties to coordination.

There’s reciprocal coordination, where one benefits themselves. And there’s no reciprocal coordination. Of course, a group itself is strongly incentivized to make sure that incentives are such that all good coordination is reciprocal.

One main thesis is that a lot of what people consider “morality” is really “coordination”. A few reasons.

• It makes a lot of sense that groups would try to get their members to coordinate in any way they could. Morality / religion are obviously useful things for a collective.
• People want to be seen as good people. Coordinating can be mistaken for altruism, so why not pretend it’s altruism? That way people will think higher of you.