Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

August 13th, 2022

edited 2022-08-12 · open in Roam
  • infinite regress concerns regarding social modelling human superorganism basic superorganism - autonomy training
    • as far as I can tell we do some sort of parallelization thing
    • in some sense, this is maybe part of what trust is
    • Unwritten rules: virtual bargaining underpins social interaction, culture, and society
      • has 115 citations as of rn
      • high-level quotes
        • > • Individualist models of social cognition face problems of infinite regress.

          • Human interaction crucially jointly involves improvising unwritten rules created by a process of virtual bargaining.

          • These unwritten rules are the foundation of culture and social structure.
        • > Many social interactions require humans to coordinate their behavior across a range of scales. However, aspects of intentional coordination remain puzzling from within several approaches in cognitive science. Sketching a new perspective, we propose that the complex behavioral patterns – or ‘unwritten rules’ – governing such coordination emerge from an ongoing process of ‘virtual bargaining’. Social participants behave on the basis of what they would agree to do if they were explicitly to bargain, provided the agreement that would arise from such discussion is commonly known. Although intuitively simple, this interpretation has implications for understanding a broad spectrum of social, economic, and cultural phenomena (including joint action, team reasoning, communication, and language) that, we argue, depend fundamentally on the virtual bargains themselves.
      • has implications for the nature of unilateral action
      • doesn't involve trust or altruism/kindness/other-valuing
        • tho obviously those are in fact involved in many real life situations too
        • ah, and ofc also they're investigating first-order game theory, ie without the ability to change the game to find a win-win
        • it seems that two trustfully-synergic agents could engage in creative virtual win-win negotiation
          • and that in some sense this does actually happen lots, with simple physical coordination, or with sex, etc etc
          • tho ofc unless you actually talk, you're in some sense still missing certain kinds of cointelligence
      • they use moving a table as an example!! ...which is great
      • talks about the importance of common knowledge
        • > Moreover, mere mutual knowledge (i.e., both players knowing the same thing) is insufficient; for each player to be able to justify following the terms of a virtual bargain, the players must have common knowledge of the assumptions on which this bargain is based; that is, each knows these assumptions, knows that the other knows, knows that the other knows that they know, and so on indefinitely (e.g., 13, 14). For example, if both players believe that the table is heading for the living room but one erroneously believes that the other has a different goal, virtual bargaining is likely to fail.
      • mmm! very related to betrayal as well / what is betrayal in the context of positive-sum game theory?
      • joint attention
        • > The manipulation of joint attention is itself a critical element in social interaction: joint attention influences common knowledge, which in turn may influence the virtual bargain reached. Thus, joint attention is a resource that must be virtually bargained over and is subject to subtle cultural conventions
        • > Joint attention/perception we jointly attend to X if the fact that we are attending to X is common knowledge between us. That is, not only are we both, say, looking at the same object, but we both know that we are looking at the same object, and know that we know this, and so on.
      • feels weird that "bargaining" is being used here, in the examples of two soccer players jointly executing a pass
        • a good sign that they started by trying to solve a narrower range of puzzles then noticed generality--- which is cool! but kinda like predictive processing being inside out
      • differences in some processing or prior or something here are probably related to the double empathy gap between neurotypicals and neurodivergents
        • > We suggest that the ability to create virtual bargains underpins the complexity of society and that the open-ended, flexible, and contingent nature of such bargaining helps explain how we are able, to a good approximation, to assimilate and follow what might appear to be an inordinately elaborate set of rules without consulting any explicit rule book.
      • yeah, this virtual bargaining thing is actually super fucking fundamental
        • > communication – and specifically language, in terms of which explicit rules are formulated – presupposes virtual bargaining
        • just tweeted at John Vervaeke suggesting he check it out
        • I feel like I want to call this simulated convergence or something
          • or parallel deciding
          • but those don't actually capture what "virtual bargaining" does, even in the cases where "bargaining" feels a bit weird
          • simulated negotiation is what I tried to search for just now
        • I guess there is ultimately quite a complex power landscape everywhere
          • even with the sports team... weird power-over dynamics would be a distraction, but they would be involved if they were involved, like if one player was getting boycotted for some social reason
          • and the despot-table example makes it clear that power stuff is in the background of simple social moves
          • so then synergetic equal-regard vibes are just one special case
          • "what's best for the whole" is one particular kind of priority people can have in a negotiation, huh... hm.
            • hmmm right, they contrast virtual bargaining as a type of explanation with "team reasoning" or "we-thinking"
              • > Team reasoning a form of reasoning in which agents infer, and implement, a shared plan that is ‘best for the team’ (e.g., 30, 31). Team reasoning, like the related notion of ‘we-thinking’ 32, 33, is often viewed as a particular ‘frame of mind’: people can choose to be individualists or team reasoners, depending on the context. Virtual bargaining is a possible account of the origin of team ‘objectives’ and ‘plans’, but virtual bargaining is a broader notion, applying even when people have conflicting interests (as might be true of the despot and servant in Box 3).
  • What happened to the Synergetics Society?