Posted by alexandra_k on September 24, 2013, at 1:44:36
In reply to Re: the Titanic, posted by Dr. Bob on September 21, 2013, at 3:54:39
> > I suppose you can say this is an autocracy-- but maybe we haven't tested the limits of our potential participation--
I was reading the following and it reminded me of stuff Willful has been posting on this thread:
(I posted this to social, too, but with typo's)
The author is considering traditional community groups who are trying to co-ordinate their action towards sustainably using a common resource. Water for irrigation or whatever. There might be a worthwhile analogy between that kind of case and the kind of case where Babble is a community group of people who are trying to co-ordinate their action towards sustainability where people provide support and education to each other. Problems arise... In how much communities of people can successfully co-ordinate their actions to this end... Or how much a few people will free-ride... Threaten or undermine this process in some way... Such that there needs to be external governmental control to impose sanctions for behaviour that threatens to undermine the common good.
The situation is complicated in a way because Bob isn't entirely coming from outside. The author is highly critical of an imposition of authority from outside (e.g., US engineers coming in and trying to solve irrigation problems in India where they lack fundamental understanding of local ecological conditions). Bob isn't an outsider in that sense. He does have local knowledge of the norms and customs here. Indeed... He has played a significant part (as a founding member, if you like) in the local norms and customs. But in a way he is an outsider since he doesn't participate as we do.
Once upon a time...
> The market was seen as the optimal institution for the production and exchange of private goods. For non-private goods, on the other hand, one needed "the" government to impose rules and taxes to force self-interested individuals to contribute necessary resources and refrain from self-seeking activities. Without a hierarchical government to induce compliance, self-seeking citizens and officials would fail to generate efficient levels of public goods, such as peace and security...
> The classic models have been used to view those who are involved in a prisoner's dilemma game or other social dilemmas as always trapped in the situation without capabilities to change the structure themselves... Whether or not the individuals, who are in a situation, have capacities to transform the external variables affecting their own situation varies dramatically from one situation to the next. It is an empirical condition that varies from situation to situation rather than a logical universality.
> When analysts perceive the human beings they model as being trapped inside perverse situations, they then assume that other human beings external to those involved - scholars and public officials - are able to analyze the situation, ascertain why counterproductive outcomes are reached, and posit what changes in the rules-in-use will enable participants to improve outcomes. Then, external officials are expected to impose an optimal set of rules on those individuals involved. It is assumed that the momentum for change must come from outside the situation rather than from the self-reflection and creativity of those within a situation to restructure their own patterns of interaction.
> collective action theory has paid more attention to payoff functions than to how individuals build trust that others are reciprocators of costly cooperative efforts. Empirical studies, however, confirm the important role of trust in overcoming social dilemmas... the updated theoretical assumptions of learning and norm-adopting individuals can be used as the foundation for understanding how individuals may gain increase levels of trust in others, leading to more cooperation and higher benefits with feedback mechanisms that reinforce positive or negative learning. Thus, it is not only that individuals adopt norms but also that the structure of the situation generates sufficient information about the likely behaviour of others to be trustworthy reciprocators who will bear their share of the costs in overcoming a dilemma. Thus, in some contexts, one can move beyond the presumpton that rational individuals are helpless in overcoming social dilemma situations.
> Asserting that context makes a difference in building or destroying trust and reciprocity is not a sufficient theoretical answer to how and why individuals sometimes solve and sometimes fail to solve dilemmas... The following attributes of microsituations affect the level of cooperation that participants achieve in social dilemma settings (including both public goods and common-pool resource dilemmas).
(me paraphrasing now:)
- Communication between participants
- Reputation of participants is known
- Higher return on co-operation
- Easy to opt out (so can opt out if one starts to feel like one is being taken for a sucker and others are less likely to take advantage)
- Longer time horizon (people plan on sticking around rather than dropping in then out again)> - Agreed upon sanctioning capabilities. While external sanctions or imposed sanctioning systems may reduce cooperation, when participants themselves agree to a sanctioning system they frequently do not need to use sanctions at high volume, and net benefits can be improved substantialy.
So....
The moral...
A moral... One thing to take might be... That things wouldn't inevitably disintegrate if Bob were to stop with the blocking already... But... We would need to pick up the slack with our norms... But then if we picked up the slack with our norms... Would Bob need to block? Does his blocking prevent or counter our community norms or are they in synch in some way? Is Bob appropriately an insider or does he impose his authority from the outside without sufficient knowledge of local conditions?
I don't know. I have a fever. I'm sick and borderline delirious, I think...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1050564
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20130903/msgs/1051234.html