I think a missing piece of this analysis for the present is the way that hyper-skepticism can come back around and make you just a different type of mark. Sovereign citizens, for example.

A population of Marks is a highly efficient one. At the speed of trust.

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

I think a further development is that skeptics are, in many contexts, losing the tools and leverage needed to reject the grifters.

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.

>Grift is cyclical, and any period of high grift will soon give way to a period of high skepticism

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.

To this model I would add the transaction costs for vetting a transaction, the cost of identifying and engaging transaction partners, and the relative sensitivity to a negative outcome (the stake as a percentage of total stake).

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.

Maybe, but… the cycle can be very long. Everyone in Russia is a skeptic or a grifter, and it’s been that way for decades with no sign of grift being on its way out.

This is a great post. It's even got useful ternary diagrams, and it gives an explanation of why the NFT grift disappeared. Too bad cryptocurrency in general is only mentioned in the context of rug pulls. This theory must not extend as far as whatever powers crypto.

The meta strategy seems clear: if the world seems full of grifters, stop being a Mark, and start being a Skeptic.

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

I am going to steal this code and run a different analysis. The author mentions that skeptics avoid grifters without punishing them. I am curious how things play out in the Seven Samurai model, where instead of marks you have peasants and instead of grifters you have bandits. What happens if you have samurai not skeptics? Who both take rice from the peasants and protect them from greater exploitation by bandits.

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

What about grifters who are also marks? Grifters aren't immune from grift.

this "The start of a slide into a new post-truth dark age?"

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.

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