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submitted 1 day ago by LadyButterfly@reddthat.com to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] Live_your_lives@lemmy.world 0 points 22 hours ago

I think you are overselling it's incorrectness and so horseshoeing back around to being like the people who oversell it's truthfulness. Yes, the tragedy of the commons is misleading if taken in isolation, but something being misleading does not automatically make it scientifically incorrect. Do you have direct evidence or an argument for why the tragedy of the commons isn't the most likely outcome if the circumstances just so happen to match the assumptions Hardin made?

[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

I think you are overselling it's incorrectness and so horseshoeing back around to being like the people who oversell it's truthfulness.

I am not.

Do you have direct evidence or an argument for why the tragedy of the commons isn't the most likely outcome if the circumstances just so happen to match the assumptions Hardin made?

Here you go

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/07/scientific-fraud.html

Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.

The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/

https://news.osu.edu/the-tragedy-of-the-commons--minus-the-tragedy/

https://news.cnrs.fr/opinions/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-commons

https://landscapewanderer.link/tragedy/

https://discardstudies.com/2019/07/15/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/tragedy-of-the-commons-garrett-hardin-white-supremacy-enclosure-privatization-history

[-] Live_your_lives@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

To be clear, I agree with you like 95% of the way, it's that last 5% that I still think you are overselling and would like you to be more careful with.

The problem is that Hardin's argument simply isn't much of a scientific one in the first place and is instead much more of a logical one. (I was being sloppy when I asked for direct evidence, so sorry about that.) Hardin made the massive assumption that people are wholly self-interested. If people are only trying to maximize their own share of the resources regardless of what it might cost others, then it is impossible to escape the competition that creates for the limited amount of resources that the commons provides. All of the examples and articles you've brought up attack that assumption and/or focus on the conclusions Hardin made based on those assumptions, but do nothing to actually disprove the fundamental argument behind the tragedy of the commons.

[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

I see what you are saying but my argument is that in real world systems the vast majority of the time it is in the individual's self interest to enrich and defend a shared wealth/commons.

The idea that it isn't is inherently a belief not a finding of science and it has been imposed on us through cultural means for political reasons.

You can create narrow conditions where the self interests of the individual existentially diverge from the interests of the group, I don't dispute that.... rather I think Capitalism is monomanically obsessed with creating these systems artificially and through violence and imposed collapse.

I am fumbling at things Naomi Klein has already more brilliantly expressed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine