Here’s a bunch of stuff off the top of my head, in no particular order, including people who aren’t thinking much about the issue in full generality, but are addressing aspects:[1]
there are groups trying to reform the US voting system
various groups are trying to get money out of politics, eg trying to get Citizens United v. FEC overturned. there are various anti-corruption groups and pro-transparency groups
there have been various attempts to establish a world government
the legal system is one of the main instruments society has for acting on its values and determining facts in specific cases. there’s a lot of work on what it should be like
i think a bunch of sociologists are studying polarization and social media echo chamber stuff
there’s a bunch of work on how to inform people / how to get people to pay attention / how to get people to believe something. eg advertising research, work on how to run propaganda campaigns, theory of journalism
there’s a bunch of work on how to make people able to understand stuff: education theory, designing curricula, teaching
metascience and in particular replication crisis stuff. people trying to improve academic publishing, peer review, academic credit assignment
the field of social epistemology. also just epistemology
there’s a bunch of work on the social and bioevolutionary development of cooperation and trust and trustworthiness. there’s psychology research and self-help stuff on developing into a trustworthy person
there’s a lot of work on how to reduce crime
probably many other directions in sociology and social theory
So, there’s a huge amount of work broadly on coordination. Maybe there should be a more systematic body of understanding here. Maybe there should be an academic field. My personal term for this is “weltgeistbehandlung”. Copying a note I wrote on this for myself:
“In a broad sense, “weltgeistbehandlung” just means improving the world. In a stricter sense, it’s about improving the more living parts over the inert parts (like, improving the academic credit assignment system, not making buildings more beautiful), the more procedural/meta parts over the more object-level parts (like, reducing dysfunction in democratic systems over reducing animal suffering). Even more strictly, it is about improving the more think-y parts of the world: about making the world more truth-tracking, about making the world generate new ideas faster when a need arises, about making decision-making more guided by the best thinking, about making it so our values are worked out more fully, about making it so our values are better heard when decisions are made.
it is somewhat less a science and more an engineering discipline. it’s like medicine / medical science, but we’re healing the world-spirit
a central theme is setting up incentives, setting up hyperparameters, pushing the world toward goodness, with the heavy lifting being done by blind local mess incentives (even by stuff like greed and status-seeking), as opposed to being done by some pure correct judgments of goodness operating locally. like, if we’re setting up incentives with goodness in mind, ultimately the good stuff that happens is (to the extent that we’re successful) caused by a judgment of goodness, but this is happening indirectly. it’s about nudging a mad weltgeist subtly so it propels itself toward goodness. it’s about making goodness rewarded, comfortable, easy. it’s about making good processes/institutions/agents/etc outcompete others. it’s about preserving and expanding the niche/purpose of each good thing. it’s about making goodness win.
i think it should set out to be looking mostly for pareto improvements. despite being sort of about organizing our polis, it could still be kinda apolitical. that said, sometimes some groups just have to lose (eg people who explicitly want to make AIs even if they cause human extinction, eg paid lobbyists or companies effectively buying policies)
important components of weltgeistbehandlung:
coming up with general components for schemes. like patent auctions, prediction markets, accountability mechanisms
analyzing decisions between options (like, which voting scheme should we have?)
implementing these proposals (like what a doctor does)
identifying issues: like, noticing that there is a lot of lying in US business and politics, noticing that one isn’t sufficiently incentivized to provide some certain public good, noticing that academia is goodharting in various ways, etc”
Here’s a bunch of stuff off the top of my head, in no particular order, including people who aren’t thinking much about the issue in full generality, but are addressing aspects: [1]
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Michael Vassar
ACS
economics has the subfields of social choice theory and mechanism/incentive/institution design. public economics is also relevant. internalizing externalities
there’s a bunch of econ stuff on people coordinating in/as a firm
there is a lot of political philosophy/theory/science on what sorts of political institutions we ought to have. eg see here for a bunch of pointers to
there are groups trying to reform the US voting system
various groups are trying to get money out of politics, eg trying to get Citizens United v. FEC overturned. there are various anti-corruption groups and pro-transparency groups
there have been various attempts to establish a world government
the legal system is one of the main instruments society has for acting on its values and determining facts in specific cases. there’s a lot of work on what it should be like
i think a bunch of sociologists are studying polarization and social media echo chamber stuff
there’s a bunch of work on how to inform people / how to get people to pay attention / how to get people to believe something. eg advertising research, work on how to run propaganda campaigns, theory of journalism
there’s a bunch of work on how to make people able to understand stuff: education theory, designing curricula, teaching
retroactive funding, impact markets
there are various forecasting and (specifically) prediction market initiatives, eg metaculus and manifold
people who created and run twitter community notes, fact-checking in general
people running wikipedia
people running the alignment forum and lesswrong
work on reputation systems
metascience and in particular replication crisis stuff. people trying to improve academic publishing, peer review, academic credit assignment
the field of social epistemology. also just epistemology
there’s a bunch of work on the social and bioevolutionary development of cooperation and trust and trustworthiness. there’s psychology research and self-help stuff on developing into a trustworthy person
there’s a lot of work on how to reduce crime
probably many other directions in sociology and social theory
So, there’s a huge amount of work broadly on coordination. Maybe there should be a more systematic body of understanding here. Maybe there should be an academic field. My personal term for this is “weltgeistbehandlung”. Copying a note I wrote on this for myself:
“In a broad sense, “weltgeistbehandlung” just means improving the world. In a stricter sense, it’s about improving the more living parts over the inert parts (like, improving the academic credit assignment system, not making buildings more beautiful), the more procedural/meta parts over the more object-level parts (like, reducing dysfunction in democratic systems over reducing animal suffering). Even more strictly, it is about improving the more think-y parts of the world: about making the world more truth-tracking, about making the world generate new ideas faster when a need arises, about making decision-making more guided by the best thinking, about making it so our values are worked out more fully, about making it so our values are better heard when decisions are made.
related but clearly non-synonymous: social epistemology, metascience, incentive design, institutional design. i think tikkun olam is somewhat similar. LATER EDIT: Daniel Schmachtenberger’s The Consilience Project seems very similar
characterizing weltgeistbehandlung:
it is somewhat less a science and more an engineering discipline. it’s like medicine / medical science, but we’re healing the world-spirit
a central theme is setting up incentives, setting up hyperparameters, pushing the world toward goodness, with the heavy lifting being done by blind local mess incentives (even by stuff like greed and status-seeking), as opposed to being done by some pure correct judgments of goodness operating locally. like, if we’re setting up incentives with goodness in mind, ultimately the good stuff that happens is (to the extent that we’re successful) caused by a judgment of goodness, but this is happening indirectly. it’s about nudging a mad weltgeist subtly so it propels itself toward goodness. it’s about making goodness rewarded, comfortable, easy. it’s about making good processes/institutions/agents/etc outcompete others. it’s about preserving and expanding the niche/purpose of each good thing. it’s about making goodness win.
i think it should set out to be looking mostly for pareto improvements. despite being sort of about organizing our polis, it could still be kinda apolitical. that said, sometimes some groups just have to lose (eg people who explicitly want to make AIs even if they cause human extinction, eg paid lobbyists or companies effectively buying policies)
important components of weltgeistbehandlung:
coming up with general components for schemes. like patent auctions, prediction markets, accountability mechanisms
constructing particular incentive-fixing/goodness-promoting proposals
analyzing decisions between options (like, which voting scheme should we have?)
implementing these proposals (like what a doctor does)
identifying issues: like, noticing that there is a lot of lying in US business and politics, noticing that one isn’t sufficiently incentivized to provide some certain public good, noticing that academia is goodharting in various ways, etc”
I’ll be taking a somewhat broad view on what counts as a “coordination failure”, as you seem to be taking.
Also Game-B.
I think Jan Kulveit also thinks about this as a part of the theory of change of FABRIC (?).