The insight I took from this was to beware of a scary kind of norms: not just norms those inadvertently cause equilibria, but norms which serve to maintain the equilibrium itself.
For example, requiring a publication track record in academia is intended to ensure people produce sufficiently good research output, and as a side-effect causes p-hacking and similar. However, it seems to me (though it was a while since I read it) that anti-social punishment (and relatedly, punishment of non-punishers) mostly serves to enforce the validity of the current set of norms (as opposed to some other terminal goal).
This suggests that not all norms are equally important for the stickiness of equilibria (which is an important property to keep in mind when reasoning about coordination and equilibrium-shifting), and points to some gears for predicting (and creating!) stickiness.
Nominating to bump this up to 2 reviews.
The insight I took from this was to beware of a scary kind of norms: not just norms those inadvertently cause equilibria, but norms which serve to maintain the equilibrium itself.
For example, requiring a publication track record in academia is intended to ensure people produce sufficiently good research output, and as a side-effect causes p-hacking and similar. However, it seems to me (though it was a while since I read it) that anti-social punishment (and relatedly, punishment of non-punishers) mostly serves to enforce the validity of the current set of norms (as opposed to some other terminal goal).
This suggests that not all norms are equally important for the stickiness of equilibria (which is an important property to keep in mind when reasoning about coordination and equilibrium-shifting), and points to some gears for predicting (and creating!) stickiness.