Bargain, Compromise and Desire

My Top Lesson From Nate Silver's Book, On The Edge

When people negotiate norms that apply to a broader public, they keep their most destructive beliefs. But when people bargain for tangible things for themselves, they keep their least destructive beliefs.

That was the thesis of an article I wrote several months ago. Today, I want to ask a simple question: what kind of person engages in bargaining and what kind of person engages in compromise?

A longstanding topic of this newsletter is selection effects. What are the asymmetric character traits of people drawn to certain institutions?

Nate Silver’s new book describes The River: a set of “degenerate gamblers” drawn to Wall Street and crypto among other areas. Wall Street is the pinnacle of bargaining. On the bustling floor of the New York Stock Exchange, every single deal that gets struck involves two people who think they’re getting a bargain out of the other. And the more wrong the other person is, the better the bargain. The Stock Exchange selects for competitiveness, ruthlessness, and intelligence in pursuit of getting one up on your fellow traders.

On the other side of the river (or both sides?) is the Village. It’s the set of high-status compromisers who negotiate social norms, media, and politics. Nate … doesn’t seem to think highly of the Village. They’re neurotic, innumerate, status-obsessed, and closed-minded. And worst of all, they write bad tweets about Nates’s models! There’s a lot of truth in Nate’s description. The compromise of norms requires an nonstop vigilance for threats to status, whether that’s scandal, affiliation, or shifting trends. That’s because in order to keep the formal and informal agreements at the foundation of moral compromises, and therefore at the foundation of the moral compromisers’ power, they have to avoid crossing red lines. The whole premise of the compromise is to impose these red lines on whoever is part of the deal. So it only makes sense that the ideal compromiser is hyper-aware of potential transgressions by they themself or their community.

In the River, people who can’t see truth lose their money. In the Village, those who can’t help but speak truth lose their status.