Robin Hanson has written about organizational rot: the breakdown of modularity within an organization, in a way which makes it increasingly dysfunctional. But this is exactly what coalitional agency induces, by getting many different subagents to weigh in on each decision.
I speculate (loosely based on introspective techniques and models of human subagents) that the issue isn’t exactly the lack of modularity: when modularity breaks down over time, this leads to subagents competing to find better ways to work around the modularity, and creates more zero sum-ish dynamics. (Or maybe it’s more that techniques for working around modularity can produce an inaction bias?) But if you intentionally allow subagents to weigh-in, they may be more able to negotiate and come up with productive compromises.
I speculate (loosely based on introspective techniques and models of human subagents) that the issue isn’t exactly the lack of modularity: when modularity breaks down over time, this leads to subagents competing to find better ways to work around the modularity, and creates more zero sum-ish dynamics. (Or maybe it’s more that techniques for working around modularity can produce an inaction bias?) But if you intentionally allow subagents to weigh-in, they may be more able to negotiate and come up with productive compromises.