118 - Adversarial Dynamics

Hypocrisy is an adversarial advantage in any system where accountability is absent. It creates a variable where none should be, allowing the hypocrite a greater degree of agility, making them "slippery".

The trait of hypocrisy has grown entrenched in the upper management of numerous Fortune 500 companies today, because it offered this advantage. In such environments lacking accountability, this trait was favored like a form of natural selection. The same has been observed in numerous political contexts.

In social media the same rings true again, where those added degrees of agility systematically bias a population and/or system in favor of the hypocrite. Neither populations nor the vast majority of systems have proven capable of holding people accountable for their actions, except in very select and extreme cases, such as the most horrible crimes and when they feel the need for a scapegoat.

This poses an obvious problem for the "Sustainability" of any system, as a system without accountability inevitably degenerates. Hypocrisy corrupts the feedback mechanisms of a system, preventing it from successfully adapting, or even maintaining itself.

Human cognitive biases aren't very adept at calling upon an accurate record of events and holding people accountable for making terrible predictions, or the decisions based on those predictions. This is partly because human memory is subject to very strong biases that cause the "experiencing self" and "remembering self" to diverge sharply, as illustrated by researchers with the "Peak-End Rule", "Duration Neglect", and various other biases. As Prof. Tetlock famously illustrated, political pundits are less accurate than a "dart-throwing-chimpanzee", and even after being highlighted in such a rare and extensive study it still remains very rare for them to be held to account.

What might companies, political parties, and influencers look like if they were held accountable for their actions? If you ask most people you'll likely hear some variation of "quite different", even if they remain mostly blind to the hypocrisy within whatever parties and beliefs they themselves adhere to.

Ethics cannot exist within any system that lacks accountability, and so accountability is a prerequisite for any endeavor where ethics is itself a requirement. Everything starts with accountability, and this is something that the systems my team has pioneered could greatly assist with.

A smart investor could secure themselves a massive buffer while bringing about the utter ruin of each of their competitors where accountability has been systemically absent. Whether a smart investor exists remains an open question. Do you know any?