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Lumifer comments on Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama - Less Wrong
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Why are you calling your suggestions a "coordination strategy"? As far as I can see you are suggesting top-down policies enforced by the usual state enforcement mechanisms. You are talking in the language of "require", "forbid", "regulate" -- that's not coordination, that's the usual command-and-control.
Top-down policies enforced by the usual state enforcement mechanisms are the typical way people implement coordination.
Err... No.
Top-down policies happen when voluntary coordination fails. They're generally a sign of disagreement and mistrust: building an edifice of bureaucracy so that everyone knows exactly what they're expected to do and giving others recourse when they fail to do it.
But voluntary coordination is hard, especially when it involves large groups of people, which is why we invented governments.
No. You can force people to do something you want. That's not cooperation at all, that's just plain-vanilla coercion.
I'm using the word "cooperate" in the technical sense of "cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma". In this sense it's possible for an outside force to coerce cooperation, in the same way that e.g. the government forces your neighbor to cooperate rather than defect and steal your stuff, or anti-doping agencies force athletes to cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma of whether to use performance-enhancing drugs.
For the technical sense of "cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma" you need to have a prisoner's dilemma situation to start with. Once you coerce cooperation you have effectively changed the payoffs in the matrix -- the "defect" cell now has a huge negative number in it, that's what coercion means. It's not a prisoner's dilemma any more.
Huh? Why do you think I'm in a prisoner's dilemma situation with my neighbour?
If you make your child taller, your child is better off (+competitive advantages, -other disadvantages of being taller) and your neighbor's child is worse off (-competitive advantages).
If your neighbor makes his child taller, his child is better off and yours is worse off.
If you both make your children taller, the competitive advantages cancel out and you each have only the disadvantages.
Being tall is not a disadvantage even if you take away "competitive advantages" (normally tall, not freakishly tall). An arms race is a different situation that a prisoner's dilemma.
The original claim was that the neighbor might "steal your stuff" which isn't a prisoner's dilemma either.
And most importantly, I do have neighbors. I don't feel I am in a prisoner's dilemma situation with them and I suspect they don't feel it either.
Because the government altered the payoff matrix making cooperation individually preferable to defection.
Imagine you were a hunter-gatherer: within your tribe, a system of reputation and customs, with associated punishments for defectors, tended to enforce cooperation, but different tribes occupying in neighboring areas typically recognized no social obligations towards each other, and as a result all encounters were tense and very often violent, warfare and marauding were endemic.
With a modern government you can interact with most strangers from your country or most other countries with a reasonable expectation that the interaction will be peaceful and productive.
It wasn't a prisoner's dilemma to start with. Hunter-gatherers do not live in a constant prisoner's dilemma situations.
I don't get the LW's obsession with the prisoner's dilemma. It's a very specific kind of situation, rare in normal life. If you have a choice between cooperation and non-cooperation that does not automatically mean you're in a prisoner's dilemma.
Hunter A steals Hunter B's kills/wives/whatever. Defection pays off. Cooperation always pays more overall, defection pays the defector better. "Government" in this case is tribal; we'll kill or exile defectors. (Exile is probably the genetically preferable option, since it may result in some of your genes being spread to other tribes, assuming you share more genetics with in-tribe than with out-tribe individuals; a prisoner's dilemma in itself.)
Pretty much every situation in real life involves some variant on the prisoner's dilemma, almost always with etiquette, ethical, or legal prohibitions against defection.
Prisoner's dilemma is the simplest idealized form of all scenarios where a group of agents prefer that everyone cooperates with each other rather than everyone defects to each other, but for each individual agent, whatever the other agents do, it has an incentive to defect.
There are other common types of scenarios, of course: in zero-sum scenarios cooperation is not possible: a hunter and their prey can't cooperate to split calories between each other in a way that benefits both.
In other scenarios, cooperation is trivially the best choice: if Alice and Bob want to move a heavy object from point A to point B and neither is strong enough to move it alone, but they can move with their combined strength, then they have an incentive to cooperate, neither has an incentive to defect since if one of them defects then the heavy object doesn't reach point B.
These scenarios are trivial from a game-theoretical perspective. The simplest and arguably the most practically relevant scenario where coordination is beneficial but can't be trivially achieved is the prisoner's dilemma.
Actually some of the disadvantages of being tall would disappear (in the longish run) if everybody was tall. For example, if the average person was 1.90 m, cars would be designed accordingly and wouldn't be as uncomfortable for people 1.90 m tall.