I like this post in part because of the dual nature of the conclusion, aimed at two different audiences. Focusing on the cost of implementing various coordination schemes seems… relatively unexamined on LW, I think. The list of life-lessons is intelligible, actionable, and short.
On the other hand, I think you could probably push it even further in “Secret of Our Success” tradition / culture direction. Because there’s… a somewhat false claim in it: “Once upon a time, someone had to be the first person to invent each of these concepts.”
This seems false about markets, for instance. Markets in goods can exist without any specific person understanding them or how they work, I think? (Far too much of history, after all, is people stumbling across markets, saying “This seems bad”, breaking it, and suffering consequences.) And similarly money-like things can certainly arise without anyone understanding them.
It’s also false (almost certainly?) about language, the o.g. coordination mechanism.
(And if you wanted to reach: Is monogamy a coordination scheme that makes men work harder, as some anthropologists think? If so, it’s doubtful it was conceived of as such by more than a tiny handful of people! Or maybe that’s just stretching “coordination scheme” way too far, I don’t know.)
I don’t really have a greater conclusion from this, though. These are all points in the same direction, moodwise, as the original article is pointing, I think.
Yeah, I think a recurring wrong thing throughout the Coordination Frontier sequence is me thinking in terms of people inventing mechanisms. I think this is mostly not cruxy for what the Coordination Frontier sequence is for, which is a guide for people who are optimizing for experimenting and pushing forward coordination theory/practice. Slow Cultural Accumulation is probably how many coordination mechanisms first happened, but it ain’t gonna compound fast enough to navigate the 21st century.
I like this post in part because of the dual nature of the conclusion, aimed at two different audiences. Focusing on the cost of implementing various coordination schemes seems… relatively unexamined on LW, I think. The list of life-lessons is intelligible, actionable, and short.
On the other hand, I think you could probably push it even further in “Secret of Our Success” tradition / culture direction. Because there’s… a somewhat false claim in it: “Once upon a time, someone had to be the first person to invent each of these concepts.”
This seems false about markets, for instance. Markets in goods can exist without any specific person understanding them or how they work, I think? (Far too much of history, after all, is people stumbling across markets, saying “This seems bad”, breaking it, and suffering consequences.) And similarly money-like things can certainly arise without anyone understanding them.
It’s also false (almost certainly?) about language, the o.g. coordination mechanism.
(And if you wanted to reach: Is monogamy a coordination scheme that makes men work harder, as some anthropologists think? If so, it’s doubtful it was conceived of as such by more than a tiny handful of people! Or maybe that’s just stretching “coordination scheme” way too far, I don’t know.)
I don’t really have a greater conclusion from this, though. These are all points in the same direction, moodwise, as the original article is pointing, I think.
Yeah, I think a recurring wrong thing throughout the Coordination Frontier sequence is me thinking in terms of people inventing mechanisms. I think this is mostly not cruxy for what the Coordination Frontier sequence is for, which is a guide for people who are optimizing for experimenting and pushing forward coordination theory/practice. Slow Cultural Accumulation is probably how many coordination mechanisms first happened, but it ain’t gonna compound fast enough to navigate the 21st century.