[derefr]

You're thinking of "rules" as in externally-imposed rules. The parent is using "rules" in the sense of social contracts and market incentives: best-practices that emerge from the game-theoretic equilibria between players.

For example, "don't start a nuclear war" isn't an explicit rule by some world government, but it does seem to be a rule all the world-leaders are implicitly following. For another, "don't appear to be physically weak in prison" is a "rule" that everybody knows, despite no single authority enforcing it. The environment itself—made up of the other players and their incentives—enforce it, through their self-interested reactions.

[gress]

And people are just unfeeling automata whose only value is to maximize their game theoretic outcomes. /s

[pjlegato]

Perhaps what you refer to as "feeling" is a maximized game theoretic outcome, or a component thereof.

[gress]

Clearly, because game theory is the ultimate theory of the nature of the universe, consciousness included. /s

[Retra]

No, you're telling me that that's what I'm thinking. I haven't said what I'm thinking.

If I _were_ to do so, it would sound like "There's no point in hating the rules, because the rules don't care. Hate the players, because they are the ones who care enough about them to follow them."

I don't care if these rules are explicit or not; I care that they don't produce the outcome I want. And the people who follow those rules are not absolved by weakness, ignorance, self-interest, or any other excuse in failing to resist those rules.

(There's no rule that says anything done in self-interest is correct. Sometimes it is correct to make sacrifices for others.)