If you could just “convince people” to go along with solving a collective action problem, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a collective action problem. The whole idea of a collective action problem is that this sort of coordination is difficult. And in this case one of the things the government can do is solve collective action problems.
The government is a clumsy and forceful way to do coordination. I don’t have a problem with a thousand people voluntarily signing a contract to do a religious commune or whatever. But forcing people to play along when they don’t want to and would leave if they could, just so you can preserve a tradition is pretty horrible. We generally call that “tyranny”.
I proposed my own coordination layer for solving the collective action problem—ask a Mind to search for people who would be interested in your thing and would voluntarily agree to do it. Convincing people is a lot easier when you’re talking to the top 1000 people most likely to be interested. Yes, sometimes you won’t find enough people to sustain your weird archaic tradition and it’ll die out. The alternative is to force them to sustain it and I consider that unacceptable.
If you could just “convince people” to go along with solving a collective action problem, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a collective action problem. The whole idea of a collective action problem is that this sort of coordination is difficult. And in this case one of the things the government can do is solve collective action problems.
The government is a clumsy and forceful way to do coordination. I don’t have a problem with a thousand people voluntarily signing a contract to do a religious commune or whatever. But forcing people to play along when they don’t want to and would leave if they could, just so you can preserve a tradition is pretty horrible. We generally call that “tyranny”.
I proposed my own coordination layer for solving the collective action problem—ask a Mind to search for people who would be interested in your thing and would voluntarily agree to do it. Convincing people is a lot easier when you’re talking to the top 1000 people most likely to be interested. Yes, sometimes you won’t find enough people to sustain your weird archaic tradition and it’ll die out. The alternative is to force them to sustain it and I consider that unacceptable.