One think I’d also ask about is: what about ecology / iterated games? I’m not very sure at all whether there are relevant iterated games here, so I’m curious what you think.
How about an ecology where there are both people and communities—the communities have different aggregation rules, and the people can join different communities. There’s some set of options that are chosen by the communities, but it’s the people who actually care about what option gets chosen and choose how to move between communities based on what happens with the options—the communities just choose their aggregation rule to get lots of people to join them.
How can we set up this game so that interesting behavior emerges? Well, people shouldn’t just seek out the community that most closely matches their own preferences, because then everyone would fracture into communities of size 1. Instead, there must be some benefit to being in a community. I have two ideas about this: one is that the people could care to some extent about what happens in all communities, so they will join a community if they think they can shift its preferences on the important things while conceding the unimportant things. Another is that there could be some crude advantage to being in a community that looks like a scaling term (monotonically increasing with community size) on how effective they are at satisfying their peoples’ preferences.
One think I’d also ask about is: what about ecology / iterated games? I’m not very sure at all whether there are relevant iterated games here, so I’m curious what you think.
How about an ecology where there are both people and communities—the communities have different aggregation rules, and the people can join different communities. There’s some set of options that are chosen by the communities, but it’s the people who actually care about what option gets chosen and choose how to move between communities based on what happens with the options—the communities just choose their aggregation rule to get lots of people to join them.
How can we set up this game so that interesting behavior emerges? Well, people shouldn’t just seek out the community that most closely matches their own preferences, because then everyone would fracture into communities of size 1. Instead, there must be some benefit to being in a community. I have two ideas about this: one is that the people could care to some extent about what happens in all communities, so they will join a community if they think they can shift its preferences on the important things while conceding the unimportant things. Another is that there could be some crude advantage to being in a community that looks like a scaling term (monotonically increasing with community size) on how effective they are at satisfying their peoples’ preferences.