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by gnomewascool 1026 days ago
That's a very interesting comparison (thanks!), but I'm not sure if it's the correct framing. Making scraping technically difficult would be equivalent to trying to score a goal (so still not great, for the rest of the world, but probably not hypocritical).

Trying to prevent certain classes of behaviours via legal means is more like trying to prevent certain types of play, by appealing to the referee, while still doing them yourself. Clearly, this often does happen in sports, but _is_ generally seen as hypocritical.

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For quite sometime I've always felt that "sports analogies" are overwhelmingly the BEST way to frame most microeconomic disputes. Much better than the far inferior Darwin-esque "Survival of the fittest" metaphors that imply some natural order to certain types of greed and bad behavior.

There's NOTHING natural about our economic systems. They're all COMPLETELY made up, let's treat them that way.

(and yes, here it is about 'lobbying the ref')

Sport in general is a cultural phenomenon and it seems that all cultural phenomena share a lot of similarities.

Genetics however is not only a useful model, it's hard science. You can experimentally find out whether some characteristic is e.g. Mendelian (I'd doubt the greed is, as normally defined).

It got me thinking that to cross the two domains, there is also a meta-concept of cultural viruses ("memes") to which Dawkins applied Darwinian model. Definitely not hard science, but they kind of counter your point that "there's NOTHING natural about our economic systems".

I mean, it's true that you might see phenomena that echo natural systems or things, but I suppose what I'm getting at is: unlike natural systems, the "rules" can be changed.

Honestly, what helped me a lot is: Economic systems are more like video games than "nature." Sure, video games can look like nature, but also are extremely malleable.