模倣子 The Tragedy of the Koffee Klatch

The cheating situation may or may not be rampant.  The Dunkin' Donuts coffee is gone, with the label still there, left up in the cabinet, and there's only about one potful worth left of the Seattle stuff. I didn't make any yesterday since there was a pot left over.  The half-n-half is almost all gone.

Did you and I use that stuff all up?  There are only about three dollars in the kitty, and of course, only our two names.

Do you want to make an announcement or something?  Maybe let the experiment carry on through to the new year and then maybe craft some kind of announcement that you could send out.

Let's hold off on an announcement for now (see below).

It's interesting. you'd think that where MONEY is involved, people would be more "moral" about adherence to "rules".

Actually, this is to be expected, when you think about it. There is no social bullying since membership is thought to be "purchased" with money, not with behaviour.  Therefore, there is no impetus to bully others out of misbehaving, i.e., cheating. Does that sound right?  This is one theoretical result I was hoping to discover, and I was kind of suspecting that this would be the result, i.e., that throwing money into the equation would make people LESS moral, not MORE.

This may be a general principle. (1)

To design a memetic system, I think you have to decide what the goal is in terms of what you want "infected" individuals to do, and how you want them to defend the system (the immunomemes), and only then think about what you want the output of the system, e.g., "that there always be a hot, fresh pot of decent coffee over in the kitchenette and somehow everybody who wants to drink it pays for it".

What we've come up with so far does not contain very good immunomemes for defending the system. Maybe something like "$1 a cup for non-members, half-and-half included".  We need to work on this.

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(1) This is again the idea that you made me think of, i.e., the concept of residual memetic reward, or residual memetic debt.  Or in this case you could almost say "vicarious" residual memetic debt, for example, Oh, those greedy [corporations] are getting more from the consumers than they deserve, so they won't miss it if I get a little bit for free (as opposed to a consumer who HAS paid getting more than he DID pay for, which is regular residual memetic debt).