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The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

arxiv.org

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Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#31

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Animats wrote: post #28

The pseudo-academic style of the article is awful. All abstractions and buzzwords, no examples. Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range". Getting past that, the author has a point. There's a loss of shared expertise when there aren't people arou…

> Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range".

The term is not "common" or "commons" but "tragedy of the commons" which dates back to a book in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. Elinor Ostrom subsequently showed that most or all of Hardin's assumptions and claims were wrong, or at the very least, far from universal, and that the process he describes elides what actually drives the destructions of resources held in common: greed and power.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#32

Post by bluGill »

Animats wrote: post #28

The pseudo-academic style of the article is awful. All abstractions and buzzwords, no examples. Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range". Getting past that, the author has a point. There's a loss of shared expertise when there aren't people arou…

Us manufacturing is larger than ever and still growing. It is mostly automated though so Tht number of people who work in manufacturing is shrinking. Still the expertise is still there and they do hire people all the time.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#33

Post by zackmorris »

I thought the article was going to be about countless millions of minds trying to win the internet lottery and merely reinventing the wheel or failing.

I'm not worried about AI taking jobs. I'm worried that humanity has lost the ability to share at such a monumental level that basic sustenance and financial security are out of reach, even with AI.

After lifetimes of negative reinforcement, the only salvation seems to be the disruption of capitalism itself. Somewhat ironically, the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world seem to be investing trillions of dollars into AI to do just exactly that.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#34

Post by fmbb »

io84 wrote: post #7

A new and growing fear I have is that AI cuts off some of the most well-trodden pathways to intellectual growth. Every time the AI solves a problem that I would not have been able to efficiently solve alone, it has replaced an interaction that previously would have happened with a mentor/supervisor/code reviewer. This is faster for the person seeking the micro-assistance, but there is a flipside: fewer human-to-human…

Maybe it just means more people are pushing some envelope (their own) faster and more often than before.

In the aggregate everyone maybe learns on average about as much new stuff in a year anyway.

There _are_ still humans out there talking to each other.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#36

Post by zaphar »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31
Animats wrote: post #28

The pseudo-academic style of the article is awful. All abstractions and buzzwords, no examples. Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range". Getting past that, the author has a point. There's a loss of shared expertise when there aren't people arou…

> Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range". The term is not "common" or "commons" but "tragedy of the commons" which dates back to a book in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. Elinor Ostrom subsequently showed that most or all of Hardin's assumptions and c…

I think you might be thinking about Elinor Ostrom and she didn't show that his assumptions and claims were wrong exactly. She expanded on the work to clarify the difference between managed vs unmanaged commons. Showing that successful commons are managed in some way with established rules and limits around the usage. The term still has use especially if it is used to clarify the need for management of common resources to avoid the tragedy.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#37

Post by mjburgess »

zaphar wrote: post #36
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range". The term is not "common" or "commons" but "tragedy of the commons" which dates back to a book in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. Elinor Ostrom subsequently showed that most or all of Hardin's assumptions and c…

I think you might be thinking about Elinor Ostrom and she didn't show that his assumptions and claims were wrong exactly. She expanded on the work to clarify the difference between managed vs unmanaged commons. Showing that successful commons are managed in some way with established rules and limits around the usage. The term still has use especially if it is used to clarify the need for management of common resource…

which is also basically the same point made by Hobbes about the state of nature

Hobbes, Rousseau were effectively both trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" problem with political collaboration. Hobbes is widely misunderstood by (romantic, naive, libertarian) fools to have said that absent a powerful soverign, life is "nasty brutish and short". What he more accurately said is that, "an unmanaged commons is nasty bruitsh and short" -- to use that kind of language

Rousseau, to the same romantic strain is widely misunderstood to have said that 'the unmanaged commons' is a delight. Instead, he basically said politically community isnt that required anyway, and if you're in trouble, just run away.

In either case, the tragedy of the commons issue is well known in other guises throughout the history of philosophy

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#38

Post by underlipton »

mjburgess wrote: post #37
zaphar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be thinking about Elinor Ostrom and she didn't show that his assumptions and claims were wrong exactly. She expanded on the work to clarify the difference between managed vs unmanaged commons. Showing that successful commons are managed in some way with established rules and limits around the usage. The term still has use especially if it is used to clarify the need for management of common resource…

which is also basically the same point made by Hobbes about the state of nature Hobbes, Rousseau were effectively both trying to solve the "tragedy of the commons" problem with political collaboration. Hobbes is widely misunderstood by (romantic, naive, libertarian) fools to have said that absent a powerful soverign, life is "nasty brutish and short". What he more accurately said is that, "an unmanaged commons is nas…

These are both ways of saying that the problem isn't the commons (shared ownership), it's an issue of accountability (where "abandon something broken and find another" is a way of exercising accountability).

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#39

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

zaphar wrote: post #36
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, the tragedy of the commons concept is far older than 1968. The term "common" refers to common grazing land upon which anyone could graze animals. That's an English term. The American equivalent is "open range". The term is not "common" or "commons" but "tragedy of the commons" which dates back to a book in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. Elinor Ostrom subsequently showed that most or all of Hardin's assumptions and c…

I think you might be thinking about Elinor Ostrom and she didn't show that his assumptions and claims were wrong exactly. She expanded on the work to clarify the difference between managed vs unmanaged commons. Showing that successful commons are managed in some way with established rules and limits around the usage. The term still has use especially if it is used to clarify the need for management of common resource…

My understanding of Ostrom's work was to show that basically almost all commons were managed, and that when they were not, that was the result of selfish actors deliberately seeking to dismantle the management structures to further their own individual interests.

Re: The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

#40

Post by sfny »

This paper misrepresent fundamental concepts from Ostrom’s work, which won a Nobel, and fails to contextualize Hardin’s theories. As a 'human resource development' paper it somehow pretends that capitalism doesn't exist?

Hardin coined "The Tragedy of the Commons" in 1968, elaborated on his theory in his 1974 paper "Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor". He was a eugenicist and specifically targeted refugees. He lobbied US Congress in opposition to international famine relief. His evidence-free theories must be contextualized within his overall white-nationalist project. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/garrett-...

The paper asserts that "expertise within a profession" is a commons. As an industry we've never been able to define the specific, task-level role boundaries between PM/designer/engineer across companies. So how is a profession defined? What are the units of expertise here? This paper fails to provide a defensible definition of their commons. Ostrom's commons need clear boundaries and resource units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

From the abstract: "*The paper reframes expertise development as collective stewardship*" which ignores capitalism.

Firms are incentivized to build proprietary expertise, eg Slang at Goldman. Individuals are incentivized to build proprietary expertise and use it as leverage for higher compensation. Even if we fudge commons into a more generic collective action problem, this paper doesn't reckon with the tension between market incentives and collective expertise. This tension comes up again and again, in open source, in academia, and corporate L&D programs.

The author goes on to use professional organizations as an example of governance for their Cognitive Commons. The examples of medicine, law, and engineering are particularly bad as these are credentialed, legally enforced enclosures of expertise, and not self-policing or democratic. They are the opposite of commons.

The author should have just written about expertise as a resource pool and avoided the commons. This was a frustrating read. The paper is a disservice to the commons literature.

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