tl;dr – I’d like to see further work that examines a ton of examples of real coordination problems that rationalists have run into (“stag hunt” shaped and otherwise), and then attempt to extract more general life lessons and ontologies from that.
...
1.5 years later, this post still seems good for helping to understand the nuances of stag hunts, and I think was worth a re-read. But something that strikes me as I reread it is that it doesn’t have any particular takeaway. Or rather, it doesn’t compress easily.
I spent 5 minutes seeing if I could distill it down in some fashion – either distill the 15 questions into a smaller higher-order-cluster, or distill the life-lessons from the various examples. But that ended up feeling like the wrong approach. These three examples were the ones that Zvi had available at the time, but might not be the best to generalize from.
This is maybe all fine – not everything needs to compress easily. Sometimes it’s just useful to read through some considerations and examples. I personally am glad to have re-read this post, because I’m thinking a lot about coordination now, and having some meaty examples is useful. But I’m not sure this genre of post makes sense for a Best Of book.
But I think there are two different questions I might ask about this post, re: Longterm Curation.
Does this make sense to include in a Best of 2019 book?
Does this make sense to include in a dedicated Coordination Book (either comprehensive book of essays, or perhaps explicit textbook?)
For the first question, it depends a lot on what else is up for consideration. My guess is we have enough great posts that this one wouldn’t make my personal cut, but I think the post is solid and I’d feel good about including it if it turned out to be in the top 40.
For the second question, I think it’d be net-positive to include this post in a Coordination Sequence. But for the Coordination Textbook, it feels like not-quite-the-right thing and I suspect there’s a better version of it out there waiting to be written.
What I’d really like to see is someone who does “Babble Challenge: List 50 coordination failures among rationalists and nearby folk”, and then goes through most of those and explores what the shape of the “game” was (was it a stag hunt or something else?) and then tries to draw out some commonalities and life lessons.
Right now I’m real-into-stag-hunts, but I’m not sure that’s actually the right frame for most problems. (It feels more one-size-fits-all than “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, but not sufficiently. I’ll also be commenting about this in my self-review of “Schelling Choice is Rabbit.”)
I just reviewed the OP this post responds to, and sounds like we’re thinking along similar lines in many ways—I’d like to see a Big Book of Coordination at some point, and hold both posts back until then, or if people like both enough include both.
Here is my offer: Cherry-picking examples is bad, and worry that someone cherry-picked them is also bad. Appearance of impropriety, register your experiments, other neat stuff like that. So if Raemon or someone else compiles a list of the concrete examples, I’ll make at least an ordinary effort to do a post about them, intended to be similar to things like Simple Rules of Law.
tl;dr – I’d like to see further work that examines a ton of examples of real coordination problems that rationalists have run into (“stag hunt” shaped and otherwise), and then attempt to extract more general life lessons and ontologies from that.
...
1.5 years later, this post still seems good for helping to understand the nuances of stag hunts, and I think was worth a re-read. But something that strikes me as I reread it is that it doesn’t have any particular takeaway. Or rather, it doesn’t compress easily.
I spent 5 minutes seeing if I could distill it down in some fashion – either distill the 15 questions into a smaller higher-order-cluster, or distill the life-lessons from the various examples. But that ended up feeling like the wrong approach. These three examples were the ones that Zvi had available at the time, but might not be the best to generalize from.
This is maybe all fine – not everything needs to compress easily. Sometimes it’s just useful to read through some considerations and examples. I personally am glad to have re-read this post, because I’m thinking a lot about coordination now, and having some meaty examples is useful. But I’m not sure this genre of post makes sense for a Best Of book.
But I think there are two different questions I might ask about this post, re: Longterm Curation.
Does this make sense to include in a Best of 2019 book?
Does this make sense to include in a dedicated Coordination Book (either comprehensive book of essays, or perhaps explicit textbook?)
For the first question, it depends a lot on what else is up for consideration. My guess is we have enough great posts that this one wouldn’t make my personal cut, but I think the post is solid and I’d feel good about including it if it turned out to be in the top 40.
For the second question, I think it’d be net-positive to include this post in a Coordination Sequence. But for the Coordination Textbook, it feels like not-quite-the-right thing and I suspect there’s a better version of it out there waiting to be written.
What I’d really like to see is someone who does “Babble Challenge: List 50 coordination failures among rationalists and nearby folk”, and then goes through most of those and explores what the shape of the “game” was (was it a stag hunt or something else?) and then tries to draw out some commonalities and life lessons.
Right now I’m real-into-stag-hunts, but I’m not sure that’s actually the right frame for most problems. (It feels more one-size-fits-all than “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, but not sufficiently. I’ll also be commenting about this in my self-review of “Schelling Choice is Rabbit.”)
I just reviewed the OP this post responds to, and sounds like we’re thinking along similar lines in many ways—I’d like to see a Big Book of Coordination at some point, and hold both posts back until then, or if people like both enough include both.
Here is my offer: Cherry-picking examples is bad, and worry that someone cherry-picked them is also bad. Appearance of impropriety, register your experiments, other neat stuff like that. So if Raemon or someone else compiles a list of the concrete examples, I’ll make at least an ordinary effort to do a post about them, intended to be similar to things like Simple Rules of Law.