I find it interesting to compare this post to Robin Hanson’s “Who Likes Simple Rules?”. In your post, when people’s interests don’t align, they have to switch to a simple/clear mechanism to demonstrate alignment. In Robin Hanson’s post, people’s interests “secretly align”, and it is the simple/clear mechanism that isn’t aligned, so people switch to subtle/complicated mechanisms to preserve alignment. Overall I feel pretty confused about when I should expect norms/rules to remain complicated or become simpler as groups scale.
I am a little confused about the large group sizes for some of your examples. For example, the vegan one doesn’t seem to depend on a large group size: even among one’s close friends or family, one might not want to bother explaining all the edge cases for when one will eat meat.
I think those two cases are pretty compatible. The simple rules seem to get formed due to the pressures created by large groups, but there are still smaller sub-groups within large groups than can benefit from getting around the inefficiency caused by the rules, so they coordinate to bend the rules.
In the vegan case, it is easier to explain things to a small number of people than a large number of people, even though it may still not be worth your time with small numbers of people. It’s easier to hash out argument with one family member than to do something your entire family will impulsively think is hypocritical during Thanksgiving.
I find it interesting to compare this post to Robin Hanson’s “Who Likes Simple Rules?”. In your post, when people’s interests don’t align, they have to switch to a simple/clear mechanism to demonstrate alignment. In Robin Hanson’s post, people’s interests “secretly align”, and it is the simple/clear mechanism that isn’t aligned, so people switch to subtle/complicated mechanisms to preserve alignment. Overall I feel pretty confused about when I should expect norms/rules to remain complicated or become simpler as groups scale.
I am a little confused about the large group sizes for some of your examples. For example, the vegan one doesn’t seem to depend on a large group size: even among one’s close friends or family, one might not want to bother explaining all the edge cases for when one will eat meat.
I think those two cases are pretty compatible. The simple rules seem to get formed due to the pressures created by large groups, but there are still smaller sub-groups within large groups than can benefit from getting around the inefficiency caused by the rules, so they coordinate to bend the rules.
Hanson also has an interesting post on group size and conformity: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/towns-norm-best.html
In the vegan case, it is easier to explain things to a small number of people than a large number of people, even though it may still not be worth your time with small numbers of people. It’s easier to hash out argument with one family member than to do something your entire family will impulsively think is hypocritical during Thanksgiving.