basic superorganism - autonomy training

> • 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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

> 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

I guess there is ultimately quite a complex power landscape everywhere

eg chef in kitchen

could do this with each person bringing some food, then trying to find trades that mutually benefit

would I know if something needed my attention right now?
+ if I would, and it doesn't, then I can rest / do whatever I feel like
+ if I would, and it does, let me attend to that
+ if I wouldn't, then I probably want to do something about that