Maybe back then it would also been called a meme. The Dawkins kind. 
How do you understand the tragedy of the commons and how do you consider it a myth?
If you need help because you are in a fight not of your starting, the more bystanders the better as it is more likely that enough people will intervene to restrain the person assaulting you.
This study shows that.
If you are (already) on the ground injured or incapacitated for some reason I suspect the bystander effect kicks in and the more people around, the less likely you are to get help.
It is easy for a group to collectively ignore you - inadvertent groupthink goes ‘well, nobody else stopped so I guess he can’t be in that bad a way’.
A single person passing, with nobody else around is far more likely to stop.
The post’s headline - and first paragraph - here is misleading in that it implies valid extrapolation to ALL situation types, from one experiment involving a conflict or ‘violent emergency’ situation.
Okay, my big problem with this study is this:
The sample they had was a collection of clips of CCTV ‘conflicts’ that were caught by people actively monitoring the incident. But do we actually believe that these CCTV monitors are actually seeing and recording all the incidents that take place?
Isn’t another explanation that bystander intervention is an escalation of the conflict, and therefore what is happening is that there’s a lot of conflicts that are getting ignored by the CCTV operator, vs a selection of incidents where the bystanders do intervene, and so attract the CCTV operator? Could the CCTV operator therefore be themselves vulnerable to the bystander effect?
The operators might have been told to start recording when the “operative noticed a potential for violence”, but this is a subjective measure that can easily be skewed by “well, look, all those guys are ignoring the situation, so it’s not serious enough”.
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Not speaking for @lizard-of-oz here, but generally real life doesn’t support the idea that you can count on people to misuse commonly held or shared resources for their own personal gain. Historical accounts of actual commons show they were not generally tragic. If someone wants to point to a case where a common or shared resource is overused by individuals who figure they might as well take what they can and calls that an example of a tragedy of the commons then that’s one thing. But when people make decisions to avoid having shared resources because they believe the tragedy of the commons is a law of human behaviour, that’s believing in a myth.
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I feel like ‘can count on’ is trying to extrapolate out the idea to an extreme extent. I would interpret on the tragedy as well, a danger that can happen, whose incidence is affected by various factors, that has to be defended against by various ways. That seems quite justifiable.
I think seeing the tragedy as being about the danger of sharing resources is a bit odd, the tragedy is about privatising benefit and sharing cost. It’s when you have individuals being allowed to derive unlimited amounts of benefit while harming everyone else.
I mean it fits more a situation of unregulated capitalism more than anything, and supports the idea of say, a socialistic method of limiting how much any one individual can possess and consume so that a resource is more evenly shared.
It originally refers to the real activity of people allowing their livestock to graze on actual commons. The commons was a shared resource, and the worry was that people would overgraze. So it was privatizing benefits and sharing grass. These days we’d probably be able to turn even grass growing into a “cost” somehow, but it was about people taking more than their share of what nature provided back when we thought nature provided things.
The cool thing about logic is that you can use anything to support anything. But personally my experience with people citing the tragedy of the commons comes from economists who think we avoid it by making sure that everything is owned by someone and therefore the owners has a stake in its maintenance. I’m not saying that really makes sense, but it explains my personal tendency to put my antenna up for bullshit when someone mentions it.
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Boing Boing has two posts that explain exactly what I mean. Can’t search right now, but they‘re easy to find.
I find a lot of BB’s coverage of economic concepts extremely questionable.
I mean at the core of it, the tragedy of the commons is a really simple idea: Build your systems to be resistant to selfish assholes. That’s the colloquial term for homo economicus. Not everyone is an asshole but if your system can’t absorb even a single one, bad things may well happen.
I mean it’s pretty obvious an idea isn’t it? If some bad people use it in bad faith, so what? I really don’t recommend ditching it because it’s the essential concept applicable to stuff like greenhouse gas emissions.
The two posts are a much better response to what you write than I can offer you right now.
They first one explains where the metaphor comes from, the second one why it is a myth.
If you‘re still unconvinced after reading them, I‘m happy to discuss them.
But I‘m pretty sure that won‘t be necessary.
Yeah, I’m very unconvinced. The basic problem with a lot of the reporting from BB is to use a historical definition from the first time it was used, discredit the first user and their argument, and that’s the end of the story.
Ironically the “toxic bullshit” article even brings up Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work in “governing the commons” in opposition to Hardin, and somehow the lesson isn’t “but now the concept is the subject of serious research by people like Ostrom”, but rather that the concept is a “myth” now?
What do you think the commons (that need governing) in Ostrom’s book (full of groundbreaking insights) are about? What tragic outcome do you think her 8 rules of commons governance is supposed to avoid? How can the article call the tragedy of the commons “toxic bullshit” and yet approvingly cite a book where the author writes of the idea:
“These models are not necessarily wrong, Ostrom states, rather the conditions under which they hold are very particular. They apply only when the many, independently acting individuals involved have high discount rates and little mutual trust, no capacity to communicate or to enter into binding agreements, and when they do not arrange for monitoring and enforcing mechanisms to avoid overinvestment and overuse.”
Oh right, they didn’t actually read the book.
As a daily reader of dingding, I can confirm that scientists are out to kill us again.
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That’s not exactly it.
Here’s the Homo economicus link that the other poster probably meant:
The (disputed) concept is that people are utility-optimizing agents when consumers, & profit-maximizing agents when producers in the economy, & that we should attempt to organize our economy in a way that best takes advantage of this immutable law of nature. That’s not the same thing as hardening the economy against abusive agents; indeed, the idea rejects that possibility, since all agents in the economy will tend toward maximizing utility or profit, & you can’t harden an economy against its own fundamental laws.
Here’s the other link the poster mentioned, re the tragedy of the commons:
I was looking at this.
That’s not the same thing as hardening the economy against abusive agents; indeed, the idea rejects that possibility, since all agents in the economy will tend toward maximizing utility or profit, & you can’t harden an economy against its own fundamental laws.
Ostrom’s work is about doing that. Ostrom’s the nobel prize winning economist when defines modern thought on the Tragedy of the Commons.
By contrast, consider Nobelist Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, whose groundbreaking insights on the management of common resources are a prescription for a better, more prosperous, more egalitarian future.
Yes, that’s right, studying the problem of the Tragedy of the Commons helps produce a prescription for a better, more prosperous, more egalitarian future.
The homo economicus article does not understand the concept of repeated games. In repeated games of Prisoner’s Dilemma homo economicus cooperates. This is one way an economy can be ‘hardened against its fundamental laws’ - by making sure individual agents can be kept track of and so bad behaviour has a lasting effect on their reputation.
Prisoner’s Dilemma games are often cited as evidence of intrinsic selfishness,
Since when? Prisoner’s Dilemma is a thought experiment that demonstrates the mutually destructive nature of intrinsic selfishness in many situations. It’s a game that is rigged so that behaving selfishly is actually bad. This is like saying the trolley experiment shows trams are bad.
Correct. The Tragedy of the Commons is. Homo economicus is not.
Is/is not what?
You’ve really never been exposed to people who use the prisoner’s dilemma as evidence that human beings are inherently selfish? People who will basically agree (or pretend to agree) that it’s sad that we don’t cooperate but who say that clearly the other guy won’t so we can’t? People who act like a Nash Equilibrium is a default or ideal state?
I’m not saying that thinking this way isn’t tacking an is-ought fallacy onto being wrong about what is in the first place. I am saying that this idea seemed rampant among students in departments of Mathematics, Philosophy and Economics when I was around them. The idea that the “rational” act was to unilaterally maximize your own rewards was sort of the default setting.
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The Tragedy of the Commons is about abusers of the economic system.
Homo economicus is not about abusers of the economic system.
Did they account for whether “witnesses” were indoors and already in pajamas versus outdoors and walking around? I always thought of that as a factor in the (now debunked and irrelevant) Kitty Genovese murder. Might just be me, though.
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