Coordination Problems: What It Takes to Change the World | Hacker News Reader

Coordination Problems: What It Takes to Change the World

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74 pointsfeross20 comments

I think most of the desirable aspects of government can be framed in terms of such coordination problems; i.e. as a mechanism for groups to enforce collective decisions on members, where deviations benefit that individual but make everyone worse off on average.

For example, I can benefit from polluting (e.g. saving money by using cheap, poorly refined fuels). My pollution costs other people, but it's only small, since I'm just one person. Hence it's rational for me to pollute.

However, I don't want other people polluting, since that will cost me. Since there are lots of other people, it may even add up to more than I would gain by being the only polluter (saving money versus, say, getting cancer).

From the perspective of individuals, this is a coordination problem. The categorical imperative (what we would like everyone to do) is to not pollute; but this is unstable, since there is incentive to deviate (e.g. save money). In a competitive environment, polluters have an advantage, so the polluting strategy will dominate.

Collective government is a mechanism to solve such problems. The group decides (e.g. by vote) that freedom from pollution is worth more than freedom to pollute, and agrees to punish polluters, disincentivising that activity, and thus changing the payoff calculation.

Of course, collective government itself introduces all sorts of new coordination problems, like corruption, revolving-doors, watching-the-watchmen, a disconnected political class, etc. (many of which are particularly evident right now!)

Very surprised this article doesn't mention Schelling points, a concept which earned Thomas Schelling the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (among other achievements): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equil...

Actually, I'll even say that this article is deficient precisely because it doesn't mention Schelling points, which are essential to understanding the kind of society-wide coordination problems discussed here.

Another fantastic take on coordination issue is Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch [0].

0 - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Related is one of my favorite essays by Aaron Z. Lewis: "Metaphors we believe by"

https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2019/07/25/metaphors-we-believe...

Metaphors We Live By is also a fantastic book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By

It's a very long read, but it's worth it. This post gave me a lot to chew on.

yes, the title and introduction don't seem too compelling from the outside, but once it gets into the topic it's indeed a great discussion of the problem witholding us from a better world.

so, I have to ask. maybe we haven't coordinated well enough to solve this, but can we coordinate well enough to at least get some bibliography on the topic, attempts at improving the situation...? or is people convinced this is unsolvable? is there any place, site, book or organization seriously trying to tackle this? (I'll search more later, but maybe someone can already add something useful)

There are a fair amount of people assembling in numerous loosely associated Discord servers, each of which tends to have it's own take/ideology on the overall situation, but you could probably categorize them all under the "Game-B" movement.

I'd like to join these servers. Where can I find them? Googling for "Game-B Discord Servers" doesn't return any useful results.

Some of them are listed here:

https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Portal_Discord_Servers

The CoffeeHouse is probably a good place to start as it's a bit of a main hub, and over time you will get invited to other ones.

Fair warning though, there is a significant amount of religion/spirituality, psychological woo woo, ironic overconfident naivete, etc. Not really all that different than you'll find in any community consisting of human beings, but the flavor and magnitude in these communities is likely quite distinctly different than what the HN culture is likely familiar with. They could sure use some more strictly rational people, and they definitely need folks with advanced technical skills, particularly programmers.

I'm guessing the reason we had all these named revolutions is because the something that inspires the name —phrygian caps, carnations, laban signs, etc— help coordinate the perception that a minority (Outer Party members?) actually believes in Moloch.

But I've never lived through one of these — anyone on HN with firsthand experience?

(Yugoslavia was, I guess, what one gets when coordination is intense but not universal)

That idea of a Nash equilibrium is very interesting. I wonder if there really are multiple Nash equilibriums for many systems. At least in the prisoner example the article talked about it seemed more like there is a single optimal N.E. and it only changed once the circumstances/system changed

Equilibria concepts in game theory are many and varied. A system may have many Nash Equilibria, in mixed strategies and in pure strategies. Nash equilibria are where no one player has an incentive to deviate from their current strategy.

Game theory is a fascinating topic I highly encourage interested folks to investigate.

What are the best software driven coordination systems for promoting collective action? Would love less mainstream examples.

Seems like there's more opportunities than feedback mechanisms (ratings), pooled auctions (Kickstarter), and market making (Uber, eBay, Amazon).

What can we do with pre commitment?

yep, I thought the same about pre-commitment, but I guess the problem is not software itself: for proposals that don't need general consensus, but only a certain threshold of support, the problem seems to be getting enough attention. Kickstarter does well in this area, but I don't think the pre-commitment involving money is such a big deal in the collective coordination aspect. I mean, you could post a call to action on a random blog, and if it gathered enough attention you would have managed to promote collective action. That requires nothing new. It has more to do with the inability to gather the attention of enough people on a single focus when there are so many other potential focuses fighting for that same attention. In my opinion, the deadlines in Kickstarter are more interesting than the pre-commitment for coordination.

And then for proposals that require general consensus, it seems to be even more complicated. In theory democracy is about this, and we kinda accept the idea of democratic consensus, but in practice things end up having to be implemented by or pass through the hands of individual actors, and it's there where everything starts to rot. So you need to make sure the distance between consensus and its practical application is short enough too? Also, as the article says, you'd like to guarantee that "those who take a different course of action will not suffer negative consequences". But this is kinda contradictory with general consensus. And you get different groups "coordinating" in different directions. Ahhh... and the less power you have, the bigger your consensus group needs to be.

The benefit of the Kickstarter-like crowdfunding model is that it solves the coordination problem. When you bid/pledge on a threshold-funded project, your bid is only paid if the project reaches its preset funding threshold-- if the threshold is not met, you pay nothing. Thus, it is individually rational to pledge on a project if you expect that your pledge will meaningfully contribute to the threshold being reached and you derive individual benefit from the project itself; each contributor is essentially "matching" others' pledges. The project creator herself can then strategically choose the threshold amount and the scope of her project to improve their appeal to prospective contributors.

(There are a few emerging problems with this model, but they're generally related to having to trust that the project will be correctly fulfilled. These problems have nothing to do with the basics of collective fund-raising; they would also arise in the exact same way whenever an individual agent is contracting with a third-party for any sort of good or service. The fact that these are by far the most commonly-cited issues with the threshold-based crowdfunding model is itself proof that the funding aspect works quite well indeed.)

I like your comment. I think this point you mention is very relevant for more complex cases:

> if you expect that your pledge will meaningfully contribute to the threshold being reached

Kickstarter solves the coordination problem for their case (which is great), but coordination is harder or easier depending on the scale. Kickstarter here deals with a "rather simple" coordination problem: value proposition and conditions are very clear and straightforward, risks are low, there are no opposing parties / colliding interests, and thresholds are low enough that individual contributions can be quite meaningful. So even if they have an interesting business around solving that coordination problem, and they managed to reach the critical mass for it to work (which I highlight as trickier than the actual software)... as programmers would say, the solution doesn't generalize. (Even if it might be a good place to start looking).

I wonder about the proverbial "friction force" to the dynamics of deception and misinformation and how that could fit in the model. It is certainly possible to generate personal gains through such actions, trivially just pump and dump schemes.

Verification can counter that some but in addition to the burden of fact checking there is the "want to believe" aspect of emotionally motivated thinking causing them to believe something merely because of how it makes them feel even if it is an absurdity.

Deception and misinformation can do a lot more than just generate personal gains, done properly it can also control the thoughts of the population to a very significant degree. As an example, look at how the public's extremely passionate opinion (both imprecise aggregate opinion, as well as precise individual opinions) on the absolute necessity of social distancing seems to have changed dramatically in the last two weeks.

> there is the "want to believe" aspect of emotionally motivated thinking causing them to believe something merely because of how it makes them feel even if it is an absurdity

This one is particularly interesting, because it is damn near impossible for one to 100% accurately perceive whether they are falling victim to various mental shortcomings (motivated reasoning, state dependent memory, post-hoc rationalization, etc etc etc) themselves - there are just way too many variables and neurological processes (that we have little understanding of) involved, and most processing is not (so they say) done in the conscious mind. If you take the example above, if you were to ask people who happened to hold extremely hardline positions on social distancing 2 weeks ago, their mind would instantaneously be able to produce an absolutely righteous and flawless (in their mind's evaluation) reason for the complete 180 in their stance. And from a more meta-perspective, I suspect there will most likely be some of this very thing happening as some people read these words. This is just how humanity works, for the time being at least.

Perhaps this phenomenon has something to do with the difficulty in changing the world.

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