People often model new norms as a stag hunt – if only we all pitched in to create a new societal expectation, we’d reap benefits from our collective action.
I think this is wrong, because it restricts the scope of what counts as a “norm” to only cover things that affect misaligned components of peoples’ utility functions. If a norm is the claim that some category of behavior is better than some other category of behavior according to a shared utility function with no game theoretic flavor to it, then anyone who fully understands the situation is already incentivized to follow the norm unilaterally, so it isn’t a stag hunt.
Seems probably true that there’s non-game-theoretic-flavored norms, and this post is mostly not looking at those. (I’m not 100% sure whether I’d call those norms, but that seems more like a semantic discussion and I don’t have a strong opinion about it)
Even for game-theoretic-flavored-norms, I actually do think the solution to some of the problems this post is hinting at (and previously discussed in The Schelling Choice is Rabbit), is to look for norms/habits/actions that are locally beneficial in single-player mode, but happen to have nice flow-through effects when multiple people are doing them and can start to build into something greater than the sum of their parts.
That said:
I think this is wrong
Fwiw I think “this is wrong” doesn’t feel quite right as a characterization of my sentence, since it comes with the hedge “people ‘often’ model new norms as a stag hunt”, which is neither claiming this happens all or even a majority of the time, nor that it’s necessary.
I think this is wrong, because it restricts the scope of what counts as a “norm” to only cover things that affect misaligned components of peoples’ utility functions. If a norm is the claim that some category of behavior is better than some other category of behavior according to a shared utility function with no game theoretic flavor to it, then anyone who fully understands the situation is already incentivized to follow the norm unilaterally, so it isn’t a stag hunt.
Seems probably true that there’s non-game-theoretic-flavored norms, and this post is mostly not looking at those. (I’m not 100% sure whether I’d call those norms, but that seems more like a semantic discussion and I don’t have a strong opinion about it)
Even for game-theoretic-flavored-norms, I actually do think the solution to some of the problems this post is hinting at (and previously discussed in The Schelling Choice is Rabbit), is to look for norms/habits/actions that are locally beneficial in single-player mode, but happen to have nice flow-through effects when multiple people are doing them and can start to build into something greater than the sum of their parts.
That said:
Fwiw I think “this is wrong” doesn’t feel quite right as a characterization of my sentence, since it comes with the hedge “people ‘often’ model new norms as a stag hunt”, which is neither claiming this happens all or even a majority of the time, nor that it’s necessary.