{"id":55184,"date":"2023-02-19T01:00:56","date_gmt":"2023-02-19T06:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=55184"},"modified":"2023-02-18T09:56:50","modified_gmt":"2023-02-18T14:56:50","slug":"qotd-doesnt-play-well-with-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/02\/19\/qotd-doesnt-play-well-with-others\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: “… doesn’t play well with others”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The incorrigible ye have always with you, as somebody must’ve said. Social science types slice it different ways, call it different things \u2014 the free rider problem<\/a>, the tragedy of the commons<\/a>, etc. \u2014 but they all amount to the easily-observed fact that some folks just can’t play well with others. Not “won’t play well with others”; can’t<\/em> play well with others. Any given population of sufficient size is going to have its unmanageable knuckleheads who are always working at cross-purposes against everyone else, who seem to just get off on causing chaos.<\/p>\n

Even purpose-built groups of highly trained specialists fall victim to it, once a certain critical mass is reached. Sports teams call that kind of guy “the locker room cancer”, but it applies to any group. Get a team of five aeronautical engineers together and you’ll get a cool plane. Get a group of fifty together, and you’ll get nothing but a giant nerd slap fight.<\/p>\n

There are three plausible explanations for this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Social<\/li>\n
  2. Biological<\/li>\n
  3. or some combo of the two.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The Left (by which I also mean the Right) will, of course, go all in on {1}. It’s an article of faith for them, but it’s not necessarily wrong because of that. See above: Every one of those aeronautical engineers engaged in the giant 50-nerd slap fight is, on his lonesome and in every other context, the definition of a solid citizen. Certainly nobody groans “There goes the neighborhood!” when someone from Lockheed Martin buys a house down the block. There must be something<\/em> to the idea that social conditions cause knuckleheadery.<\/p>\n

    Severian, “The Scientific Management of Populations”, Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, 2020-02-15.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The incorrigible ye have always with you, as somebody must’ve said. Social science types slice it different ways, call it different things \u2014 the free rider problem, the tragedy of the commons, etc. \u2014 but they all amount to the easily-observed fact that some folks just can’t play well with others. Not “won’t play well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,41],"tags":[590,139,1462],"class_list":["post-55184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-quotations","tag-engineering","tag-psychology","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-em4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55184"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80144,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55184\/revisions\/80144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}