Re:Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2...
by TeMPOraL on Monday September 03, 2018 @01:56AM
(#17900624)
> but doesn't really come to terms with why we as individuals don't spontaneously leap into unified mass action
Because human beings don't do that. Period. Coordinating people is a hard problem. Probably the hardest problem of humanity, solving which would solve everything else in time - from war and crime to sickness and death (imagine all our best and brightest focused on R&D instead of chasing grants, citations and lucrative jobs).
Coordination problems are a superset of the tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma, and other such game-theoretic concepts. They happen when there's a huge gain for everyone that, to be realized, requires everyone to make a small personal sacrifice or take some risk, but the system is set up so that people do not make those sacrifices, do not take those risks. In the tragedy of commons, the first person to defect wins big, so you're the loser for even starting to voluntarily limit your share. In prisoner's dilemma, if you cooperate but the other party doesn't, you lose big.
Because human beings don't do that. Period. Coordinating people is a hard problem. Probably the hardest problem of humanity, solving which would solve everything else in time - from war and crime to sickness and death (imagine all our best and brightest focused on R&D instead of chasing grants, citations and lucrative jobs).
Coordination problems are a superset of the tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma, and other such game-theoretic concepts. They happen when there's a huge gain for everyone that, to be realized, requires everyone to make a small personal sacrifice or take some risk, but the system is set up so that people do not make those sacrifices, do not take those risks. In the tragedy of commons, the first person to defect wins big, so you're the loser for even starting to voluntarily limit your share. In prisoner's dilemma, if you cooperate but the other party doesn't, you lose big.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ is a great discussion of those problems.