Stag & Moloch Course: Intro to Collective Action v0.1 (Prototype)
Introduction to collective action problems and opportunities with applications to AI governance, climate change, information commons and more.
This course will be led by Life Itself co-founder and University of Cambridge economist Rufus Pollock (PhD). As well as being co-founder of Life Itself and co-initiator of the Second Renaissance project he has been a leading global expert on information commons and collective action problems.
Course will be ~5d online.
This will be a "prototype" course where material is being actively developed and trialled with participants. It is therefore being offered on a free-through-refund basis: we'll refund your fee if you attend all the sessions 🙂
Dates: Wed to Wed (excluding weekend) from 1530-1700 European.
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When groups of people — or nations, or organisations — could all be better off by working together, why do we so often fail to do so? And when coordination is possible, what makes it happen?
These are among the most consequential questions of our time. The opportunities for collective action are vast: agreements that could prevent catastrophic wars, institutions that could stabilise a changing climate, governance structures that could ensure powerful technologies benefit everyone rather than destabilise the world. The gains from cooperation are real and often enormous.
Yet we consistently fall short. Individually rational choices aggregate into collectively irrational outcomes. Shared resources get depleted. Global agreements collapse. Technologies race ahead of governance. The gap between what could be achieved through cooperation and what is achieved is one of the great tragedies of human organisation.
This course explores both the opportunity and the failure. It will include game theory, economics, political science, and history and many examples. What are the cultures, worldviews and structures that make cooperation possible? What undermine it, and what are some of the possible things we can do to help make cooperation more likely?
The issues are urgent and wide-ranging: governing artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies, addressing climate change and managing environmental commons, preserving shared information ecosystems, building international institutions that actually work.