Summer Closes, Time to Start Cooperating!
Robert Link
CoCos,
We've been quiet quite a while. What are folks up to? I have added a
handful of new names to the list today, and hope they will each
introduce themselves to the group. Likewise, it would be great to hear
from each and everyone one of you. Does CoCo still represent a resource
to you? How best can we reactivate you? You, personally, as an
individual?
As for me, I've taken the California Bar a 3rd time since my last post,
and am currently working on setting up a drupal site for a local
volunteer board. This put me on the #drupal-support channel in freenode,
where I spotted one of our own.
Peace,
rl
Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold how...@rheingold.com http://twitter.com/hrheingold
http://www.rheingold.com http://www.smartmobs.com
http://vlog.rheingold.com
what it is ---> is --->up to us
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natalie pang
I'm back in Asia after a long hiatus, and as some would know I've
recently taken up a new position in School of Communication and
Information in Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). I'm
interested in, and working on projects relating to the knowledge
commons (especially regional studies of it), participatory media,
collective action, and digital ruins. Like Howard, I constantly refer
to the summaries in my work.
Speaking of the summaries, a rudimentary question: are summaries still
being developed? I participated in this work some time ago, but had to
take a long break due to my thesis and fieldwork. Just wondering if
this was still going on and whether we can contribute in any way.
Hi to everyone and new members of the group, welcome! :)
regards,
natalie
Sam Rose
On Sep 1, 10:13 pm, natalie pang <natal...@gmx.at> wrote:
> Thanks for the poke Robert.
>
> I'm back in Asia after a long hiatus, and as some would know I've
> recently taken up a new position in School of Communication and
> Information in Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). I'm
> interested in, and working on projects relating to the knowledge
> commons (especially regional studies of it), participatory media,
> collective action, and digital ruins. Like Howard, I constantly refer
> to the summaries in my work.
>
> Speaking of the summaries, a rudimentary question: are summaries still
> being developed? I participated in this work some time ago, but had to
> take a long break due to my thesis and fieldwork. Just wondering if
> this was still going on and whether we can contribute in any way.
>
> Hi to everyone and new members of the group, welcome! :)
>
Welcome back. We did just add a new summary Bennet Stark over the
summer:
http://cooperationcommons.com/node/485
The first new one since 2007
We at Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation plan on
contributing later in the fall. We've also talked with various
educators about contributing, too.
Maria Droujkova
I've been following this list and some of its members for a while, because the topics are very relevant. I am spearheading several cooperative things:
- LearnSpace, a coworking/hackerspace for Cary, NC family educators: homeschoolers, unschoolers, their clubs, classes and events, but open to the larger community
- Math 2.0 Interest Group, hosting open online talks (now twice a week) for math ed community and developer leaders, and now also other talk series (GeoGebra), working groups, and conferences
- Natural Math, running local family math clubs and events, soon to expand online
- Natural Math Publishing, a community packager for advanced family math materials (in the works)
To answer your question, know-how support, through conversations, is the best way to re-activate me. For example, we are really struggling with the LearnSpace business, administration and "official registration" model right now.
I hope this is on-topic enough.
Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
Make math your own, to make your own math.
Earl Vickers
Glad to find this group!
I'm finishing up a paper for the Audio Engineering Society that
analyzes the "loudness war" in terms of game theory and cooperation
theory. Basically, the loudness war involves the fact that record
companies are applying more and more dynamic range compression to CDs
to try to make each one louder than all the others. As a result, CDs
now have less dynamic range than a 1909 Edison cylinder (!), and
people end up tuning out because of listening fatigue and lack of
dynamics and excitement. (This has nothing to do with the final
playback volume - listeners have their own volume controls and can
turn it up as loud as they want - it just relates to producers
squashing the dynamics.)
So the idea is that each company tries to make their CDs the loudest,
but since everyone is doing that, they end up with no real advantage,
and it may be adversely affecting the overall industry - a typical
social dilemma. Among other things, I'm presenting some studies
showing that we may have gone to loudness war based on a lie: while
listeners do prefer the louder of two otherwise identical recordings,
loudness appears to have an insignificant effect when choosing
between two different songs. Also, there appears to be no significant
correlation between loudness and sales rankings. It looks like people
may buy music primarily because they like it, not because it's louder
than other music.
I'm looking for a real-world example of people playing the wrong game
based on false assumptions - for example, playing a
non-(prisoner's)-dilemma as if it were a dilemma, or playing a
non-zero-sum game as if it were zero-sum. Any ideas?
Mark Frazier
I'm one of the newbies to the Cooperation Commons group. I run a small
nonprofit that bundles microscholarships and other digital goods for
grassroots initiatives in poor areas.
I've become increasingly intrigued by deep patterns in co-creation projects
and by a new type of user profile trustnets.
Here are a few links that may relate:
- Digital "gifts on a beach" - catalyzing free institutions in places where
states are collapsing: http://slidesha.re/95PNyq
- Narrative fractals for cooperative ventures in trust networks:
http://www.quora.com/What-are-narrative-fractals
- "Social tetrahedrons" as a basis for user profiles: http://j.mp/bQn4jt
- A future game idea for virtual->actual change: http://j.mp/edbSf
I'll welcome comments and ideas for improvements. Look forward to upcoming
conversations!
Best,
Mark Frazier
Openworld
http://www.openworld.com
@openworld (twitter)
Howard Rheingold
Congratulations on your new position! Someday, I hope to return to Singapore.
We could use more summary development. So, YES, you and others definitely can contribute.
Howard Rheingold how...@rheingold.com http://twitter.com/hrheingold
http://www.rheingold.com http://www.smartmobs.com
http://vlog.rheingold.com
what it is ---> is --->up to us
Natalie Pang
I'd certainly like to participate in the summaries, and perhaps guide some of my graduate students in this work too.
Cheers,
Natalie
Sent from my iPhone.
Fatima Nikayin
Natalie Pang
Welcome!
You have fascinating questions. Perhaps I may offer an example from the tiny red dot of Singapore, although this may not be purely a case of a wrong game.
Singapore is an island limited by a lack of natural resources (including land area) and challenges of a growing population. So in order to control the number of cars and traffic the government established a system known as the car ownership scheme, where one would have to purchase a certificate of entitlement - COE (like a license) to drive a car for 10 years.
These licenses are given out every month of course, and people can also renew their licenses if they wish to. However to get a license one will have to bid for them, and it can be any amount.
The interesting bit lies in the bidding wars that people engage in, thereby driving the prices of COEs much higher than they should be. People are playing the prisoner's dilemma - they have no idea what others are bidding so they put in bids as high as they could afford in the attempt to secure them. As I write, the latest price of a COE to own a car in the large-car category is now more than S$45k, whereas in the past it had costed as low as S$2. Although the objective of controlling the number of cars seems to be addressed, no one really benefit from this, because everyone is doing the same thing and it affects the motor industry as a whole. At the same time, there have been reports of car owners wanting to drive their cars as much as possible, since they paid so much for them.
While this may not be purely a case of a wrong game (since the perception of COEs is that they're scarce, and in reality it is based on how many the government wishes to release into the market), I wonder if there is a certain critical threshold by which it becomes a wrong game.
My two cents.
Regards,
Natalie
Sent from my iPhone.
Robert Link
ideas for 15 years and still haven't really found my voice. Sorry too
for my feeble ascii art skilz.
On Sep 2, 7:32 pm, Natalie Pang <natal...@gmx.at> wrote:
> People are playing the prisoner's dilemma - they have no idea what others
> are bidding so they put in bids as high as they could afford in the attempt
> to secure them.
manner of interactions in which there is either a sucker's payoff or a
failure in communication or just generally where the observer thinks a
suboptimal solution has been reached. But in its inception the
Prisoners' Dilemma was never so wide ranging. If there is iteration,
it's a different game. If there is any possibility of communication,
it's a different game. The Prisoners' Dilemma not only includes a
"sucker's payoff" in the payoff grid, but absolutely precludes
iteration and communication.
Axelrod did a great disservice by not being more precise in his naming
of his tournament. By so doing he popularized a term severed from its
proper meaning and thus muddied an already confusing scenario. Nor is
he alone. In "Two-Person Game Theory" no less a luminary than Rapoport
himself launches into a discussion of a game with a sucker's payoff
but without mention of the initial hypothetical scenario from which
the name of the game is derived (Game 34, Chapter "Nonnegotiable
Games").
Rapoport offers the following grid in Game 34, which he labels, "The
Prisoners Dilemma":
C2 D2
__________________
| | |
C1 | 5,5 | -10,10 |
| | |
--------------------------------
| | |
D1 | 10, 10 | -5,-5 |
| | |
--------------------------------
But the original scenario would look more like this:
Player A
Confess NotConfess
__________________
P C | | |
l n | -24,-24 | -240,0 |
a f | | |
y s --------------------------------
e | | |
r N | 0,-240 | -6,-6 |
o | | |
B t --------------------------------
It is a conceit of game theory that it treats of mathematics and has
no truck with messy human behavior. To the extent this is true, fine.
But since the primary interest in game theory seems to be the desire
to predict behavior (or at least to evaluate it so we can argue for or
against some given policy) it is only proper to take into account
those qualitative matters which affect human decision making. Playing
for abstract points will trigger different evaluative processes than
playing for jail time. But even when playing simply for abstract
points, point maximization criteria can yield different choices than,
say, point difference maximization (that is, it is possible, depending
on the payoff grid, to maximize one's points but lose overall,
likewise to win by accepting fewer points because in so doing one has
limited the opponent even more.)
Even more damning in Axelrod's work is that, as others before him, he
attaches labels to the moves which strongly prejudice in favor of a
given result, and this act of labeling is a prime source of confusion
about the game in its various forms. Where Axelrod and others use the
labels, "Cooperate" and "Defect", the original uses "Confess" and
"NotConfess", and in so doing raises an emotional bias against the
option of NotConfessing. Some discussions of the game bring a
paradoxical feeling that one does best by going against one's
interest, or, put in the converse, pursuing one's interests is against
one's interest, but this is primarily an epiphenomenon of using wildly
emotive terms like cooperate and defect. Worse still, using Axelrod's
work, simply by holding the payoff grids stable but changing the
labels one could as easily write a book called, "The Evolution of
Defection", or "...of Corporate Malfeasance".
Notwithstanding the above failings, which are found in most
discussions, there is another major flaw in every single analysis I
have seen: Inapt Visualization. Use of a grid in the accepted manner
leads to an illusion of interdependence which is wholly lacking in the
actual game as envisioned by Tucker and from which the name of the
game derives. A better visual model might be:
Prisoner A
| |
Confess NotConfess
| | | |
0 -24 -6 -240
The prisoner is alone in a cell. If she confesses she will either
serve no time or serve two years. THERE IS NO WAY TO PREDICT OR
INFLUENCE WHICH RESULT OBTAINS. If she does not confess, she will
either serve six months or twenty years, again, with no means by which
she can predict or influence which result obtains. Efforts to predict
yield an infinite progression of "He'll think that I think that he
thinks that I think..." The prisoner might as well be tossing coins.
The only real choice in the matter is which of two coins the prisoner
will choose to toss. But the grid visualization makes this very hard
to see, instead promoting that infinite progression of "he'll think I
think he thinks..."
Price wars may (or may not) be the result of failure to rationally
achieve and optimal result, but they bear little resemblance to the
Prisoners' Dilemma.
> While this may not be purely a case of a wrong game (since the perception of
> COEs is that they're scarce, and in reality it is based on how many the
> government wishes to release into the market), I wonder if there is a certain
> critical threshold by which it becomes a wrong game.
scarcities in intellectual property usage rights. Given modern
technology it is child's play to create an effectively limitless
supply of electronic copies of various cultural artifacts,
distribution of these artifacts is similarly simple and robust. Where
supply approaches infinity, one would reasonably expect costs to go
towards zero. However, in the U.S. copyright and patent law prohibit
unauthorized duplication, creating a false scarcity, and propping up
prices for an industry desperate to stave off the clear course of
history. To my eye that is very much a "wrong game".
Earl Vickers
That's an interesting example, thanks.
I don't have a clear understanding of what happens mathematically in
game theory when a social dilemma has a very large number of players.
It seems that any one player's impact on the overall payoffs becomes
very close to zero. If it reached zero the situation might no longer
be a dilemma, or maybe not even a "game" - you would just bid the
amount that seems best. But since each person's bids have a slight
impact on the COE prices (just as each CD's loudness slightly
escalates or de-escalates the loudness war, in my example), this
becomes a social dilemma. (Not for the Singapore government, maybe -
it seems like a very clever way of raising revenue by getting people
to pay the maximum they're willing to pay for a car.)
Unlike a 2-player prisoner's dilemma, there's no way to identify
other players and how much they've bid, and even if there were, there
are so many players that it's hard to have any leverage over any of
them.
I don't know if it's a wrong game situation. In the loudness war,
record companies may be playing the wrong game if louder doesn't
really sell better. With the car ownership scheme, it's clear that
bidding more makes it more likely that you'll get to use a car; it's
just that people are in the dark about the exact threshold. Anyway,
good food for thought.
Regards,
Earl
Natalie Pang
Thanks for the great comments, very enlightening.
What you said below reminds me of the roles that institutions play in gaming (be it communication, thereby changing the game, or allocating resources etc). I don't know as much in this area but would there be anything in the literature that addresses this in a grid?
Recently I came across a project attempting to 'model' an industry with very strong institutional participation with game theory, and wonder if that was even possible at all with existing theories.
Cheers,
Natalie
Robert Link
I'm not sure I have enough information to answer your questions
usefully. But a great place to look for this kind of information is
the research summaries filed at Cooperation Commons:
http://cooperationcommons.com/summaries
Another great resource, if you aren't already familiar with it, is
SSRN: Social Sciences Research Network. There is an increasing volume
of top shelf work available via SSRN, and the entire database is
searchable. So, for example, on interested in cooperation could search
for articles with that word in the title (there are 788 hits for that
search as of this morning.)
Hope this helps!
rl
Natalie Pang
On another note, if folks haven't seen this already, the following book
may interest you:
http://www.processedworld.com/carlsson/nowtopia_web/index.shtml
I am still reading my copy but I particularly liked the discourse about
working classes and the politics of work.
cheers,
natalie
Samuel Rose
> Thanks Robert!
>
> On another note, if folks haven't seen this already, the following book may
> interest you:
> http://www.processedworld.com/carlsson/nowtopia_web/index.shtml
>
> I am still reading my copy but I particularly liked the discourse about
> working classes and the politics of work.
>
> cheers,
> natalie
>
Thanks for sharing that Natalie. Looks like a great book.
--
--
Sam Rose
Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation
Tel:+1(517) 639-1552
Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451
skype: samuelrose
email: samue...@gmail.com
http://forwardfound.org
http://futureforwardinstitute.org
http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing
http://flowsbook.panarchy.com/
http://socialmediaclassroom.com
http://localfoodsystems.org
http://notanemployee.net
http://communitywiki.org
http://p2pfoundation.net
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
ambition." - Carl Sagan
MattCoop
Summer is just gearing up down here in Melbourne, but glad to see
activity in the group nonetheless. :)
I joined this group in 2007 while living in NYC, when I started
following up an interest in the Internet's potential for catalysing
large scale collaboration. Didn't take long to find this group.
At that time, Mark Elliott was also here researching collaboration,
from Melbourne. You can dig into the archives for a nice debate on
definitions of collaboration/cooperation/coordination.
A lot has happened since then, and I have recently migrated to
Melbourne to join Mark's company Collabforge(.com). We've had some
pretty exciting times putting theory into action with our (mostly)
government clients. We've undertaken a wide range of projects, but the
biggest theme has been collaborative (wiki-based) development of
policy and planning.
Mark recently presented our work at a UN summit on public service in
Barcelona, and it seems like there's an opportunity there to bring
some cooperative approaches to bear on the Millennium Development
Goals (which are in great danger of failing to be met).
I'd love to hear any brainstorms/insights folks on this list might
have on that subject.
Otherwise, I'm just glad to see this community up and running.
Best,
Matt
Maria Droujkova
Mark recently presented our work at a UN summit on public service in
Barcelona, and it seems like there's an opportunity there to bring
some cooperative approaches to bear on the Millennium Development
Goals (which are in great danger of failing to be met).
I'd love to hear any brainstorms/insights folks on this list might
have on that subject.
Otherwise, I'm just glad to see this community up and running.
Best,
Matt
Matt,
There seems to be an inordinate disconnect between government and institutional efforts and grassroots efforts, even online where there are (seemingly) fewer reasons for this to happen. Would you care to comment on this?
Earl Vickers
Just wanted to follow up on my earlier posting... I presented the
Loudness War paper at the Audio Engineering Society convention in
November. The game theory analysis is not very rigorous, but it gets
the idea across. If you're interested in the topic, I've posted a
20-minute video based on the presentation,
http://www.sfxmachine.com/docs/loudnesswar/ .
Happy & cooperative 2011,
Earl