My experience has been that everyone is Bob, at least some of the time in some contexts, and that leads to many situations being comprised mostly of Bobs. Bob is simply correct—he has a more accurate map than you seem to—on the topic of whether sharing his true predictions will improve or harm his future experiences.
I don’t even know how to formulate the problem statement that describes this—it feels like “humans are barely-evolved apes and consistently optimize for local/individual benefit at the expense of cooperative potential outcomes” is a bit too big to take on, but any narrower definition is missing an important root cause.
Designing mechanisms to align individual reward with the designers’ goals is one way to approach this, and prediction markets are the best suggestion I’ve heard on the topic. And they fall prey to the same underlying problem: most people aren’t seeking to improve group consensus of truth, so don’t really want to participate in activities where they don’t have some comparative advantage.
My experience has been that everyone is Bob, at least some of the time in some contexts, and that leads to many situations being comprised mostly of Bobs. Bob is simply correct—he has a more accurate map than you seem to—on the topic of whether sharing his true predictions will improve or harm his future experiences.
I don’t even know how to formulate the problem statement that describes this—it feels like “humans are barely-evolved apes and consistently optimize for local/individual benefit at the expense of cooperative potential outcomes” is a bit too big to take on, but any narrower definition is missing an important root cause.
Designing mechanisms to align individual reward with the designers’ goals is one way to approach this, and prediction markets are the best suggestion I’ve heard on the topic. And they fall prey to the same underlying problem: most people aren’t seeking to improve group consensus of truth, so don’t really want to participate in activities where they don’t have some comparative advantage.