Because much in the complex system of human interaction and coordination is about negotiating norms, customs, institutions, constitutions to guide and constrain future interaction in mutually-preferable ways, I think:
‘institution and constitution design’
deserves special attention.
This is despite it perhaps (for a given ‘coordination moment’) being in theory reducible to preference elicitation or aggregation, searching outcome space, negotiation, enforcement, …
There are failure modes (unintended consequences, concentration of power, lost purposes, corruptability, poor adaptability, plain old inefficacy) and patterns for success (stabilising win-win equilibria, reducing inefficiencies, improving collective intelligence and adaptability) which are specific to this process of negotiating and developing institutions (there are patterns, because the complex system has emergent structure like trust, corruption, coalitions, information propagation, …).
Said briefly: much (most?) coordination is about coordination because a) humans are that type of creature and b) we live in a highly iterated world.
I suspect that this is a bit too much of an anlytical and legible framework. the VAST majority of human interaction is not based on explicit rules or negotiated contracts, it’s based on socially-evolved heuristics for who to trust to do what under what conditions, and then each individual has variance in their compliance and expectations, almost none of which are ever stated clearly.
I’d love to see ‘institution and constitution design’ replaced with ‘institution and constitution studies’. Coordination is a word that hides a number of important sub-topics about enforcement/agreement for behaviors among misaligned individuals.
Seems right! ‘studies’ uplifts ‘design’ (either incremental or saltatory), I suppose. For sure, the main motivation here is to figure out what sorts of capabilities and interventions could make coordination go better, and one of my first thoughts under this heading is open librarian-curator assistive tech for historic and contemporary institution case studies. Another cool possibility could be simulation-based red-teaming and improvement of mechanisms.
If you have any resources or detailed models I’d love to see them!
What constitutes cooperation? (previously)
Because much in the complex system of human interaction and coordination is about negotiating norms, customs, institutions, constitutions to guide and constrain future interaction in mutually-preferable ways, I think:
‘institution and constitution design’
deserves special attention.
This is despite it perhaps (for a given ‘coordination moment’) being in theory reducible to preference elicitation or aggregation, searching outcome space, negotiation, enforcement, …
There are failure modes (unintended consequences, concentration of power, lost purposes, corruptability, poor adaptability, plain old inefficacy) and patterns for success (stabilising win-win equilibria, reducing inefficiencies, improving collective intelligence and adaptability) which are specific to this process of negotiating and developing institutions (there are patterns, because the complex system has emergent structure like trust, corruption, coalitions, information propagation, …).
Said briefly: much (most?) coordination is about coordination because a) humans are that type of creature and b) we live in a highly iterated world.
I suspect that this is a bit too much of an anlytical and legible framework. the VAST majority of human interaction is not based on explicit rules or negotiated contracts, it’s based on socially-evolved heuristics for who to trust to do what under what conditions, and then each individual has variance in their compliance and expectations, almost none of which are ever stated clearly.
I’d love to see ‘institution and constitution design’ replaced with ‘institution and constitution studies’. Coordination is a word that hides a number of important sub-topics about enforcement/agreement for behaviors among misaligned individuals.
Seems right! ‘studies’ uplifts ‘design’ (either incremental or saltatory), I suppose. For sure, the main motivation here is to figure out what sorts of capabilities and interventions could make coordination go better, and one of my first thoughts under this heading is open librarian-curator assistive tech for historic and contemporary institution case studies. Another cool possibility could be simulation-based red-teaming and improvement of mechanisms.
If you have any resources or detailed models I’d love to see them!