A thing I’m still fairly worried about is “how much is this actually the limiting bottleneck for coordination?”. When I asked “Hey, do you actually have a project you would personally use to coordinate action?”… there were some people who listed projects, but it generally looked more like people wishing other people would coordinate with them, when actually mostly there weren’t other people who wanted the same things they wanted.
Meanwhile the causes that seem most relevant here are political projects, which I’m pretty worried about building the tool around. I think it’ll be pretty hard to build a product that’s competitive as a political tool, without just getting coopted by toxic political forces. When I look at CollAction, I don’t feel “this is a useful coordination tool”, I feel more like “this is mostly a propaganda tool used by people trying to convince me to do vaguely pro-social things.”
I think the next step for people who want to solve this sort of thing is actually to Try Coordinating On a Thing That They Actually Want, that 100+ other people actually want, to actually test the idea at the existence proof level. I don’t think this really requires new technology – I think you could do it with a simple google doc or form or something.
Until there’s been at least 3 solid attempts to do that, I think building out more advanced software seems premature.
(I say all this as someone who is pretty excited about the idea in theory)
Yeah I’m worried about the politics too. I’m afraid that if the site gets used by one political ideology the whole site will get branded as a pro-that-ideology website. We could use CollAction, but even the people here may find it ‘icky’ to use such a ‘green-party’ site. Something something mindkiller...
But as to your first concern about people wanting to coordinate a move to a different equilibria but not finding people who also want to move to that particular equilibria; I think that’s why you need voting in there. Voting is a powerful tool to make people come to an agreement quickly and STAR-voting is great because it’s extremely hard to vote strategically. Without the voting element you’ll just have a bunch of people agreeing that the current situation is really bad, but not agreeing where they should move to.
I think the problem is that there aren’t enough people who really have this problem to warrant building a site (or at least, we’re not at the stage where we understand the problem well enough for that to be a good next step). I think the MVP here is a simple spreadsheet and google doc, or an email chain.
That would work for people that already know each other, but the whole point is that you can coordinate huge swaths of strangers. I think everyone faces these kinds of coordination problems but simply don’t have the mental or literal tools to recognize/solve them. I don’t think if we build this site people would immediately flock to it to solve the big problems like the ones in Meditations on Moloch and Inadequate Equilibria, but administration uncluttering and political action are already viable with Collaction, so simply improving upon that could be enough to get people interested.
Plus it might go quicker than you think thanks to social-signalling. If people use this site to signal that they would be totally willing to do such and such noble cause it could quickly spread the word around. Because that’s mainly what a site like this needs, lots of users → the more there are the better it works.
A thing I’m still fairly worried about is “how much is this actually the limiting bottleneck for coordination?”. When I asked “Hey, do you actually have a project you would personally use to coordinate action?”… there were some people who listed projects, but it generally looked more like people wishing other people would coordinate with them, when actually mostly there weren’t other people who wanted the same things they wanted.
Meanwhile the causes that seem most relevant here are political projects, which I’m pretty worried about building the tool around. I think it’ll be pretty hard to build a product that’s competitive as a political tool, without just getting coopted by toxic political forces. When I look at CollAction, I don’t feel “this is a useful coordination tool”, I feel more like “this is mostly a propaganda tool used by people trying to convince me to do vaguely pro-social things.”
I think the next step for people who want to solve this sort of thing is actually to Try Coordinating On a Thing That They Actually Want, that 100+ other people actually want, to actually test the idea at the existence proof level. I don’t think this really requires new technology – I think you could do it with a simple google doc or form or something.
Until there’s been at least 3 solid attempts to do that, I think building out more advanced software seems premature.
(I say all this as someone who is pretty excited about the idea in theory)
Yeah I’m worried about the politics too. I’m afraid that if the site gets used by one political ideology the whole site will get branded as a pro-that-ideology website. We could use CollAction, but even the people here may find it ‘icky’ to use such a ‘green-party’ site. Something something mindkiller...
But as to your first concern about people wanting to coordinate a move to a different equilibria but not finding people who also want to move to that particular equilibria; I think that’s why you need voting in there. Voting is a powerful tool to make people come to an agreement quickly and STAR-voting is great because it’s extremely hard to vote strategically. Without the voting element you’ll just have a bunch of people agreeing that the current situation is really bad, but not agreeing where they should move to.
I think the problem is that there aren’t enough people who really have this problem to warrant building a site (or at least, we’re not at the stage where we understand the problem well enough for that to be a good next step). I think the MVP here is a simple spreadsheet and google doc, or an email chain.
That would work for people that already know each other, but the whole point is that you can coordinate huge swaths of strangers. I think everyone faces these kinds of coordination problems but simply don’t have the mental or literal tools to recognize/solve them. I don’t think if we build this site people would immediately flock to it to solve the big problems like the ones in Meditations on Moloch and Inadequate Equilibria, but administration uncluttering and political action are already viable with Collaction, so simply improving upon that could be enough to get people interested.
Plus it might go quicker than you think thanks to social-signalling. If people use this site to signal that they would be totally willing to do such and such noble cause it could quickly spread the word around. Because that’s mainly what a site like this needs, lots of users → the more there are the better it works.