So I reread this post, found I hadn’t commented… and got a strong desire to write a response post until I realized I’d already written it, and it was even nominated. I’d be fine with including this if my response also gets included, but very worried about including this without the response.
In particular, I felt the need to emphasize the idea that Stag Hunts frame coordination problems as going against incentive gradients and as being maximally fragile and punishing, by default.
If even one person doesn’t get with the program, for any reason, a Stag Hunt fails, and everyone reveals their choices at the same time. Which everyone abstractly knows is the ultimate nightmare scenario and not the baseline, but a lot of the time gets treated (I believe) as the baseline, And That’s Terrible.
I don’t know what exactly to do about it, introducing yet another framework/name seems expensive at this point, but I think the right baseline coordination is that various people get positive payoffs for an activity that rise with the number of people who do it, and a lot of the time this gets automatically modeled as a strict stag hunt instead, and people throw up their hands and say ‘whelp, coordination hard, what you gonna do.’
In particular, I felt the need to emphasize the idea that Stag Hunts frame coordination problems as going against incentive gradients and as being maximally fragile and punishing, by default.
In my experience, the main thing that happens when people learn about Stag Hunts is that they realize that it’s a better fit for a lot of situations than the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and this is generally an improvement. (Like Duncan, I wish we had used this frame at the start of Dragon Army.)
Yes, not every coordination problem is a stag hunt, and it may be a bad baseline or push in the wrong direction. It isn’t the right model for starting a meetup, where (as you say) one person showing up alone is not much worse than hunting rabbit, and organic growth can get you to better and better situations. I think it’s an underappreciated move to take things that look like stag hunts and turn them into things that are more robust to absence or have a smoother growth curve.
All that said, it still seems worth pointing out that in the absence of communication, in many cases the right thing to assume is that you should hunt rabbit.
I still have “write my own self-review” of this post, which I think will at least partially address some of that concern. (But, since we had an argument about this as recently as Last Tuesday*, obviously it won’t fully address it)
I do want to note that I think the point your primarily making here (about misleading/bad effects of the staghunt frame) doesn’t feel super encapsulated in your current response post, and probably is worth a separate top level post.
(But, tl;dr for my current take is “okay, this post replaces the wrong-frame of prisoner’s dilemma with the wrong-frame of staghunts, which I still think was a net improvement. But, “what actually ARE the game theoretical situations we actually find ourselves in most of the time?” is the obvious next question to ask)
So I reread this post, found I hadn’t commented… and got a strong desire to write a response post until I realized I’d already written it, and it was even nominated. I’d be fine with including this if my response also gets included, but very worried about including this without the response.
In particular, I felt the need to emphasize the idea that Stag Hunts frame coordination problems as going against incentive gradients and as being maximally fragile and punishing, by default.
If even one person doesn’t get with the program, for any reason, a Stag Hunt fails, and everyone reveals their choices at the same time. Which everyone abstractly knows is the ultimate nightmare scenario and not the baseline, but a lot of the time gets treated (I believe) as the baseline, And That’s Terrible.
I don’t know what exactly to do about it, introducing yet another framework/name seems expensive at this point, but I think the right baseline coordination is that various people get positive payoffs for an activity that rise with the number of people who do it, and a lot of the time this gets automatically modeled as a strict stag hunt instead, and people throw up their hands and say ‘whelp, coordination hard, what you gonna do.’
In my experience, the main thing that happens when people learn about Stag Hunts is that they realize that it’s a better fit for a lot of situations than the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and this is generally an improvement. (Like Duncan, I wish we had used this frame at the start of Dragon Army.)
Yes, not every coordination problem is a stag hunt, and it may be a bad baseline or push in the wrong direction. It isn’t the right model for starting a meetup, where (as you say) one person showing up alone is not much worse than hunting rabbit, and organic growth can get you to better and better situations. I think it’s an underappreciated move to take things that look like stag hunts and turn them into things that are more robust to absence or have a smoother growth curve.
All that said, it still seems worth pointing out that in the absence of communication, in many cases the right thing to assume is that you should hunt rabbit.
I still have “write my own self-review” of this post, which I think will at least partially address some of that concern. (But, since we had an argument about this as recently as Last Tuesday*, obviously it won’t fully address it)
I do want to note that I think the point your primarily making here (about misleading/bad effects of the staghunt frame) doesn’t feel super encapsulated in your current response post, and probably is worth a separate top level post.
(But, tl;dr for my current take is “okay, this post replaces the wrong-frame of prisoner’s dilemma with the wrong-frame of staghunts, which I still think was a net improvement. But, “what actually ARE the game theoretical situations we actually find ourselves in most of the time?” is the obvious next question to ask)
* it wasn’t actually Tuesday.