You seem to be suggesting that knowledge is a special thing which enables us to possibly resolve tragedies of the commons and therefore we should seek it out. But in the context of global warming and the current discussion, knowledge-collection is the tragedy of the commons. To the extent that people are underincentivized to seek out knowledge, that is the commons problem we’re talking about.
Lack of knowledge of global warming isn’t the tragedy of the commons I’m talking about; even if everyone were informed about global warming, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’d resolve it. Humans can suffer from global climate change despite the entire population being informed about it, and we might find a way to resolve it that works despite most of the population being ignorant.
The question a person starting from a position of ignorance about climate change has to answer is “should I expect that learning about this issue has benefits to me in excess of the effort I’ll have to put in to learn about it?” An answer of “no” corresponds to a low general expectation of information value considering the high availability of the information.
The reason I brought up TDT was as an example of reasoning that relies on a correlation between one agent’s choices and another’s. I didn’t claim at any point that people are actually using TDT. However, if decision theory that assumes correlation between people’s decisions did not outcompete decision theory which does not assume any correlation, we wouldn’t have evolved cooperative tendencies in the first place.
Lack of knowledge of global warming isn’t the tragedy of the commons I’m talking about; even if everyone were informed about global warming, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’d resolve it. Humans can suffer from global climate change despite the entire population being informed about it, and we might find a way to resolve it that works despite most of the population being ignorant.
The question a person starting from a position of ignorance about climate change has to answer is “should I expect that learning about this issue has benefits to me in excess of the effort I’ll have to put in to learn about it?” An answer of “no” corresponds to a low general expectation of information value considering the high availability of the information.
The reason I brought up TDT was as an example of reasoning that relies on a correlation between one agent’s choices and another’s. I didn’t claim at any point that people are actually using TDT. However, if decision theory that assumes correlation between people’s decisions did not outcompete decision theory which does not assume any correlation, we wouldn’t have evolved cooperative tendencies in the first place.