coordination failures - multipolar traps

Scenarios where each agent acting in their rational (short-term) best interest, leads to collective behavior that makes everyone being worse off in the long term. .

Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid. Article - Meditations on Moloch

Agents often create [[ Reinforcing Feedback Loops ]] that increasingly move towards the destruction of common well-being.

Coordination failure is one useful lens to view the interlocking crises we face in modern societies. For example, climate change would be easier to deal with if everyone could agree to take simultaneous action to reduce carbon-intensive activity. But without that agreement, it’s in everyone’s short term self-interest to keep polluting.

The solution to coordination failure is a mix of social conventions & formal rules: think of the social pressure we put on companies to be more ecologically responsible, backed up by a police force that fines polluters. [[ Richard Bartlett ]]

a situation in which sufficient cooperation can benefit everyone, but there is some incentive to cheat or to seek a free ride. Many environmental problems that require changes in individual behavior are collective action problems. The general insights are that cooperative behaviors are more likely to emerge with repeated interactions in smaller, more homogeneous communities (or in networks that can recreate these conditions) that use punishment and communication to enforce norms and where there are few mistakes in propagating strategies or judging the need for sanctions. From [[ Paper - Social Norms and Global Environmental Challenges The Complex Interaction by Elinor Ostrom et. al ]]

Examples

• Tragedy of the Commons
• Arms Race
  • AI/bio-weapon developments
• Price wars
• Pollution of the Planet by Individual Nations

• Focusing on opportunity rather than risks

  Global Scale Coordination Failures

• Governments currently “solve” (read: address) some of these coordination failures nationally (overlogging, overfishing etc…) with rule of law and enforcement (monopoly of violence)
• Internationally, there’s no ability to do rigorous enforcement
  • sanctions are often not enough
  • Ostrom’s Framework to Managing Commons can work in small-scale, local applications. But it is much harder on a global scale, with complex power relations and catastrophic weapons

Created on: 2020-12-21 Inspired by: Daniel Schmachtenberger Related: [[ Game Theory ]] | biosphere stewardship | Article - Meditations on Moloch