[mcmoor]

It's exactly the opposite. With languages/standards, both parties has incentives to have mutual understanding so they don't need anyone else to enforce symbol equality. But with these weights, or money in general, there's huge incentive to deceive each other, so someone has to enforce the equality. That someone can be the parties themselves, but if one party lack the ability, it necessitated the creation of third-party enforcer, which can grow to be a state.

Even then, with languages, whenever there's incentive to deceive it also immediately unravels. See: exaggeration, and necessity to create whole new language of legalese for contracts.

[komali2]

You're talking about a time pre-capitalism. "Incentives" don't map to a stable cross-community market. We should talk about "reasons," not "incentives." A great reason not to try to deceive about weights is it would make nobody wants to trade with you when it gets out that you're dishonest. It may have also been considered deeply unethical in their society to do so, there doesn't need to be any enforcement mechanism beyond that for it to manifest across the entire society in an archaeological record.

[soco]

Then there's this theory that legalese was created to enforce the need for legalese, to justify it and feed it forward.

[specialist]

> huge incentive to deceive each other

Disagree.

Iterated prisoner's dilemma leads to cooperation.

[mcmoor]

There's so many variants of prisoner's dilemma at this point which have their own winner I give up tracking. I've heard the most "realistic" one have titfortat as winner, but I've also heard that in certain population mixture, the one who defect more wins.

[komali2]

Sure, it's a bit of an absurdity eventually, but when we talk about what we're actually trying to talk about with prisoner's dilemma, which is interpersonal and intergroup interaction, publicly announcing intent to collaborate and then consistently following through on that promise, seems to yield the most desirable results.