It feels like there's a political analogy here -- something about how democratic or even market practices can fail to produce the expected or desired social result.. — Srap Tasmaner

It's social-ethical behaviour; so, analogous to many (if not most, or all) instances of social group dynamics (e.g., a philosophy forum). Or, consider it to be more generally applicable to game theory.

Yes. It seems to have something to do with this 10% finding referenced in Wikipedia's article about tipping points.

And this:
"The shift from Newtonian determinism to statistical science is what makes a
physics of society possible." - Philip Ball (Critical Mass, 2004). In this book, Ball reveals how human social group behaviour appears to be predictable to the extent that it conforms to power-law probability (Pareto) distributions.

What particularly interested me here was how this intransigent behavior changed the game for everyone. We've all had experiences like this, I should think, an argument someone is unwilling to let go spoiling a conversation among friends, that sort of thing.

You could describe this as one game being turned into another by the choices and actions of one participant. What's curious is what happens if that actor is intransigent: if the original game requires, or at least if it was intended to involve, everyone, including this actor, that's off the table; other options are playing a similar game that doesn't involve him (just expel or confine this actor and carry on) or agreeing to play by this one actor's rules.

So it is with the RPI simulation of a social network's marketplace of ideas -- a small group that never adjusts gets its way.

I also found it suggestive that the specific mechanism in this case was one minority, not to put too fine a point on it, singling out a more vulnerable minority. The others respond by watching from the sidelines or trying to coach or coax the one changing the game to quit it. But their options are severely constrained; the game has changed.

BTW, I just finished Nate Silver's book, in which power-law distributions play a leading role. I'll check out Ball, and thanks for the reference!

So it is with the RPI simulation of a social network's marketplace of ideas -- a small group that never adjusts gets its way.

I also found it suggestive that the specific mechanism in this case was one minority, not to put too fine a point on it, singling out a more vulnerable minority. The others respond by watching from the sidelines or trying to coach or coax the one changing the game to quit it. — Srap Tasmaner

Thanks for the clarification.
Inasmuch as the game of tag you described is a display of aggression (specifically, dominance) by an individual, the situation bears greater resemblance to an instance of the bystander effect than it does to the effect of a minority opinion. Others may be aware of more relevant research.

Here's another stab at this ...

I would assume 2's behavior would be different if he saw it as group fooling-around, an activity better the more everyone's involved, rather than as a competition. — Srap Tasmaner

There are games of coordination (the sort of thing that Lewis takes as the basis of convention) and games of competition, and a game can be purely one or the other or mixed, as in the prisoner's dilemma.

everyone competing, everyone trying to win, and that evening out in such a way that everyone's playing and having fun — Srap Tasmaner

I might be way off here, but it seemed to me that democracy and free markets are sometimes viewed as systems of competition that somehow provide a solution to the coordination problem of living together as a society.

My example doesn't address that directly -- here, I think most of the boys treat the game as mixed, both coordination and competition. What's curious is that the one who treats the game as pure competition changes the game for everyone.

Presumably the same would be true for someone who treated it as pure coordination. I guess he would let himself be tagged rather than running? If you're playing a game with someone who isn't even trying to win, that ruins the game too.

If anything, my perhaps faulty memory of playing tag as a kid (described in the second quote) supports the market idea, that somehow competition can solve a coordination problem. But I don't have a clear view of the mechanism there. I wonder too if, in those games of tag I played as a kid, we didn't treat them as mixed rather than purely competitive, at least by avoiding the singling-out behavior in my example. I think my friends and I would have disapproved of someone going after the slowest kid in class every time he was "it".

There are games of coordination (the sort of thing that Lewis takes as the basis of convention) and games of competition, and a game can be purely one or the other or mixed, as in the prisoner's dilemma. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree.

I think most of the boys treat the game as mixed, both coordination and competition. What's curious is that the one who treats the game as pure competition changes the game for everyone. — Srap Tasmaner

I think each boy decides what type of game it is, and how they will play it, before the game even begins.

I wonder too if, in those games of tag I played as a kid, we didn't treat them as mixed rather than purely competitive, at least by avoiding the singling-out behavior in my example. I think my friends and I would have disapproved of someone going after the slowest kid in class every time he was "it". — Srap Tasmaner

I think any game which doesn't have rules that are enforced becomes a dominance conflict. Spoiler: psychopathy always wins a dominance conflict.

I'm not sure what to make of it. I'm tempted to say that 2, by being intent only on winning, and thus always going after the smallest boy, wrecked the game, at least as far as 1 and 3 were concerned, and possibly 4, though as I said 4 was at least playing a lot and he seemed okay with the challenge. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't really see any of this as a game in terms of it being a fair contest where there can be a meaningful winner. It's really just social interaction where kids are learning to interact with one another. If one turns out a bully, he'll be ostracized and he'll learn that sort of behavior will limit his social interaction. It's like watching puppies rolling around on the floor. Let them play and figure out what they can get away with as long as none are too aggressive where they're doing harm.

I don't really see any of this as a game in terms of it being a fair contest where there can be a meaningful winner. It's really just social interaction where kids are learning to interact with one another. — Hanover

Good point. But, if a learning game, then not applicable to political economy?

It feels like there's a political analogy here -- something about how democratic or even market practices can fail to produce the expected or desired social result, but I'm not sure there's an analogy for being "it", for having temporary control of the game and the direction it takes. — Srap Tasmaner

I have a similar reaction to Hanover but from a different angle: that the tag-example is oddly individualistic. It would only start applying to political economy if alliances, whether overt or not, began. If Hanover's bully were subtle they wouldn't get ostracized - they would get allies - and the game would enter social psychology.

I have a similar reaction to Hanover but from a different angle: that the tag-example is oddly individualistic. — mcdoodle

How is the tag example oddly individualistic?

It would only start applying to political economy if alliances, whether overt or not, began. — mcdoodle

If the problem is presented in terms of game theory, isn't it applicable to many types of behaviour (including those addressed by social psychology, political science, economics, etc.)? Does the problem become irrelevant to one discipline when the terms of another discipline are substituted?

So, if the tag example is a mixed motive game (i.e., a conflict problem) where convention is ignored by one player, the other players will also disregard convention (Bicchieri). Further, if the other players adopt a form of reciprocal altruism (e.g., a tit for tat strategy) toward the deviant group member, cooperation ensues (Axelrod).

Suggested initial response to the bully: all players repeatedly tag the bully.

Caveat: isolation is the only viable solution for psychopathy.

I think it's an example of two games going on at once.

1 thought they were all playing 'tag'. 2 was actually playing 'get 4', a quite different game.

Similarly, a cricketer who misses hits in order to lose a match and get a reward from a betting syndicate is apparently playing cricket but is actually playing 'beat the punters'.

...the problem is presented in terms of game theory — Galuchat

It's true, I would need to go back to square one with individualistic game theory, to criticise its relevance to another discipline. I just thought quickly in answering, from the heart. I don't know enough about game theory to talk in its terms. I know 'cooperative game theory' is regarded as something of a poor man's game theory, but I don't understand why: as you can see, my instinct is to examine alliances to explain behaviour. But I speak from ignorance, not of tag (!), but of your model.

Lots of good points here, and thanks to @Galuchat for the research summary.

As I tried to emphasize, what really jumped out at me was how the choices of a minority change the game for everyone. There are various ways they can respond, but now we're talking about something else. The game doesn't perfectly absorb their different approaches. -- In a sense it does, and they can go on playing obliviously, but the percentage each boy is It shifts noticeably. -- That made me wonder about social theories that ignore not just the different strategies participants might adopt, but the effect this can have on the game as a whole. If a minority can force a game to be one thing rather than another, that's an issue in a lot of areas.

For instance, I think I have a sort of Rortian faith in democratic practice being conducive to finding truth, in the perhaps very long run, in everything from Science to internet fora. I recently found myself saying, elsewhere on this forum, that we need to be mindful both of the philosophical import of our words and their effect on the health of the forum. I think I have some idea why now.

I should really do some research I guess, but it also seems likely to me that the issue is really whether the strategies participants in the game adopt are in sync to some degree. As I said, someone not even trying to win can also ruin a game. The best result would seem to come from everyone having a similar mix of competition and cooperation in their choices.

One more thought: the idea of science as a self-correcting enterprise amounts to a claim that in this case competition IS cooperation.

This is what I had in mind: there are theories that expect cooperation to be emergent from competition.

Yet another thought: I'm torn between the idea that cooperation might not be emergent and needs to be a first-class goal alongside competition, and the idea that market theory could be right. It's not hard to imagine cooperative behavior derailing science, for instance. Maybe some theory that should be overthrown is allowed to linger too long. In such a story, our player 2 would not be a bully but an iconoclastic hero, the one who says the emperor has no clothes. Does this make any sense?

1 thought they were all playing 'tag'. 2 was actually playing 'get 4', a quite different game. — Cuthbert

Excellent point.

This is what I had in mind: there are theories that expect cooperation to be emergent from competition. — Srap Tasmaner

My systems science perspective sees competition and cooperation as the complementary local and global poles of social organisation. So while cooperation is emergent, competition would be so as well. Each needs the other to be able to definitely distance itself from the other. There is an inner drive to bifurcate towards one or the other state. Which seems disruptive as a dynamic. And yet also, hierarchical stability is achieved overall because cooperation is generalised constraint, competition is generalised degrees of freedom. There is a balance when the overall cooperation is forming the "right kind" of locally competitive behaviour. That is the kind of competition that is (re)constructing the higher level general constraints.

So a "fair" tag game has the implicit rule that individual interactions are randomly targeted. They should approach a normal distribution. One individual then flipping the other way - deterministically targeting one interaction - is going naked competition and that breaks the general rule.

In a big enough game of tag, there would be room to be a cheater like this and get away with it. You could target the easy to get kids as a group, or target one particular kid while also throwing in enough exceptions to look reasonably random to the rest. But your small sample size means that the distance between chasing fairly and chasing unfairly doesn't offer much room except to completely flip state from cooperative to competitive mode.

The emergence of strong cooperation in social groups is about the removal of the opportunities to cheat like this. An anthropologist noted that a tribe shared evenly all the food it gathered. Until they put up their tent and found individuals wanting to take the opportunity to hide food with the outsiders' help.

So it is a tricky thing. But consider how you are viewing tag as a lesson in social fairness. You want it to be a competitive game without winners. Players should cooperate to randomise the outcome to the degree that it is simply an accident who comes out top. And as parents of kids, that seems like a great lesson in life. Pure cooperation at work. Kids like it to. It is natural to enjoy being part of a crowd having fun and where winning isn't really the thing.

But then as we get older, then games become serious. Now there are meant to be winners. And so targeting the weaknesses of opponents is no longer unfair by the rules. You do need a much tighter game structure. Lines on the ground, enforced turn taking, all kinds of rules to create equality of opportunity. But while the cooperative structure of the game is thus made completely explicit - the chaos of tag becomes the order of Wimbledon centre court - so also the competitive element becomes sharply focused. The whole point becomes that it ends with a winner and a loser.

So as I said, social organisation is about this natural dynamic of competition and cooperation. Each is emergent from the other as each can only measure itself in terms of its dialectical "other". And this dynamic is vague in a game of kid's tag. Only parents standing outside would start to form the sharp rule that interactions ought to be self-consciously random. For kids, the chaos itself would be more the point - the chance to be inside a moment of learning how sociality works.

But then mature adult games are this kind of chaotic learning stage becoming clearly polarised. We form concepts of social equality and social order, as well as the matching concepts of individual striving and acceptable degrees of social cheating. How to be acceptably competitive is also something that clearly emerges for us.

How this relates to powerlaws or scalefree network models is then another story. A further complication. Enough to say that it is the difference between a steady-state system and an expanding one. A dynamical system that is static or not growing has an equilibrium balance that conforms to a normal distribution. One that is growing freely will conform to a powerlaw distribution.

So "global fairness" looks quite different in the two regimes statistically. It has a mean in one, and no mean in the other.

This is the reason why we are conflicted by the 1% and current social inequality. Why should an individual like Bill Gates be worth more than many nations? In a static world economy, wealth ought to be normally distributed. In an accelerating world, then wealth will naturally tend to a powerlaw distribution. That becomes the new random outcome. The bigger question is whether exponential growth is possible for long in a resource-limited world. But there you go.

But your small sample size means that the distance between chasing fairly and chasing unfairly doesn't offer much room except to completely flip state from cooperative to competitive mode. — apokrisis

I wondered about this, but my guess was what mattered was the percentage. 25% is clearly enough, but my guess is that a much smaller percentage of the population could effect this kind of change. They wouldn't even need to conspire if there was an objective way the choose a target.

Not being you, I hadn't thought in terms of constraint and freedom, though it makes obvious sense.

Yet another thought: I'm torn between the idea that cooperation might not be emergent and needs to be a first-class goal alongside competition, and the idea that market theory could be right. — Srap Tasmaner

Again, take notice of the background thought here. There are two views. Either we try to engineer the system like a machine, or we recognise the power of self-organisation based on a probabilistic view of nature.

So as I say, probability theory sees two kinds of natural attractors when it comes to "fair" outcomes, fairness being really another word for globally random and unbiased.

This is one of my favourite papers on the issue - https://stevefrank.org/reprints-pdf/09JEBmaxent.pdf

Should Bill Gates be taxed to bring him back within normal distribution bounds of wealth? Or is his wealth in fact fair because we want to create a social world that is exponentially growing and not stuck in a steady-state equilibrium in terms of consumption?

Fairness or randomness or cooperation are themselves globally emergent outcomes that can be polarised by two general settings when it comes to thermodynamical balance, or emergent natural patterns.

In such a story, our player 2 would not be a bully but an iconoclastic hero, the one who says the emperor has no clothes. — Srap Tasmaner

In probability theory, there are always fluctuations. The question is whether the system itself is at a tipping point where the perturbation makes a difference. In a perfectly poised system, like the weather, a butterfly wing flap can be the difference. In a severely constrained system, it would take something huge - bigger than itself - to smash things apart. You can kick the mountain and it won't fall. It would take an asteroid, or millennia of eroding rain drops, to do that. But an avalanche could just "give way" because of the tiniest vibration.

But again, your tag game seems too small a sample size to really show any emergent dynamics like this. You just have a kid taking it into his head to win in the easiest fashion. And you as an outsider see that as being against the rule of winning in tag being random. You want this tiny sample size to replicate your ideal of social dynamics where everyone has something they can win at, and so - as the corollary -
nobody wins at everything.

the metaphysical reality of the situation of observing the act of playing a game called "tag", from an analytical perspective shows that one is of great immoral conduct.

I wondered about this, but my guess was what mattered was the percentage. 25% is clearly enough, but my guess is that a much smaller percentage of the population could effect this kind of change. They wouldn't even need to conspire if there was an objective way the choose a target. — Srap Tasmaner

But is your tag game a good model from which to extrapolate? It has unnatural features like that it is a closed system - only these four kids are playing. If there were a large pool of kids and behaviour was observed over time, then more dynamical and self-organising conclusions could be drawn.

In a realistic game of tag - as nature plays it - would this one kid switch the system? Even in your tag game, the two others are just left out. They don't change their strategy. The smallest kid is the only other one who feels forced into joining in the mutual strategy switch. Wait a little longer, and doesn't the smallest kid get fed up and walk away?

So you are illustrating the breaking of a system, not the gestation of a new self-balancing state of system organisation. There just is no organisation unless it has a self-perpetuating balance of competition vs cooperation. There is a sort of cooperativity between your 2 and 4 for a while. But it seems one that must soon break down - 4 walks off - rather than being the new stable state with mutual benefits.

This particular game was just a jumping off point, and I don't expect to draw any conclusions from it.

This is interesting:

There just is no organisation unless it has a self-perpetuating balance of competition vs cooperation. — apokrisis

This is interesting: — Srap Tasmaner

I think we all know this. But then the paradigm shift is seeing that it is a natural, probabilistic and self-organising thing. It is a mutuality or dichotomy that emerges through "pure statistics". That is why the new wave of system modelling - based on complexity and thermodynamical thinking - offers the right analytic tools.

And then the other paradigm surprise is that the statistical models themselves are polarised. We get Gaussian vs Powerlaw systems as the two limiting cases of natural probabilistic systems.

A few years back, Nassim Nicholas Taleb had a best-seller, The Black Swan, that expressed his surprise that the modern social world had become a case of Extremistan vs Mediocristan - http://kmci.org/alllifeisproblemsolving/archives/black-swan-ideas-mediocristan-extremistan-and-randomness/

Likewise there was an explosion of popular talk about fat-tail distributions.

But it was a surprise that anybody could be surprised. Once we started to get the computer power to handle non-linear calculations from the 1970s, an abundance of "emergent constraint" mathematical models poured out of science. Fractals, scalefree networks, etc.

So it offers a metaphysically-general shift in frame. We have got used to thinking of reality as a deterministic Newtonian clockwork. But actually it is all about emergent self-organising probability - the organicist or natural philosophy view.

That then is how I would analyse your example of a misplayed game of tag. You were seeking to extract some example of how a few strong actors might tip a much larger dynamical social order into a new regime - effect a phase transition. A modern probability based metaphysics makes that a right approach. It is a good starting intuition.

But then also - the point I made - this particular game could just be a breakdown in self-organisation. The lesson might be more about what now counts as unnatural about the situation described - like the short-run view of the system you were taking, and its very small number of possible interactions.

But then the paradigm shift is seeing that it is a natural, probabilistic and self-organising thing. — apokrisis

Yes, that's where I'm headed.

(BTW, I'm reading Life's Ratchet now on your recommendation. Good stuff.)

...the paradigm shift is seeing that it is a natural, probabilistic and self-organising thing. It is a mutuality or dichotomy that emerges through "pure statistics". That is why the new wave of system modelling - based on complexity and thermodynamical thinking - offers the right analytic tools. — Apokrisis

The largest and most complex type of human social group is the stratified society, which is composed of nested complex systems (e.g., political, economic, legal, etc.).

In society formation, culture (the collective mindset and consequent products of a human social group) emerges spontaneously from the resolution of dominance and territorial conflicts (Sherif & Sherif).

Cultures develop over time. Changes in mindset/convention have cascading effects on nested systems, transforming society. Sudden and/or dramatic changes in mindset/convention can cause societal breakdown.

What type of predictions can be expected of complex system modelling with regard to cultural development in stratified societies?

What type of predictions can be expected of complex system modelling with regard to cultural development in stratified societies? — Galuchat

Well stratification or nested hierarchical organisation is itself predicted by Barabási's scalefree networks. The emergent powerlaw statistics of airports will be a familiar example. Eg: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/39/15224.full.pdf

And now Bejan's Constructal Theory is pushing explicitly into social modelling. This marks a shift from purely statistical models to thermodynamical ones. Introductory chapt here:
http://www.springer.com/la/book/9780387476803

In general, hierarchy theory, which has been going strong since the 1970s, does explain hierarchical organisation in emergent terms. But that was more heuristic explanation and not mathematically developed models. Now the general mathematical models are arriving, as in the above.

You seem to be asking about cultural trends in particular. I would say that remains at the heuristic stage of argument. If you could pinpoint some trend of interest, that might jog my memory on relevant mathematical strength modelling.

But one obvious trend explained is how modern life is polarised by the contrasting pulls of specialisation and generalisation. We are both more homogenous and more diverse at the same time because we all get exposed to Trump/Kardashians/Bieber as our universal shared culture, and yet also the same social media lets us dive into the most obscure interests shared by a few.

Fifty years ago, everyone was clustered on a middle ground because TV had just a few channels. And homes, a single device. Now the internet has created a scalefree sociocultural environment. Going viral is now a thing - an emergent behaviour that is perfectly familiar.

I guess my particular slant here is then making the connection between emergence/hierarchy theory and Peircean, or even Hegelian, semiosis and dialectics.

So Peirce makes the logical and metaphysical point that all emergence must be grounded in Firstness or Vagueness - a state of pure potential or pure symmetry.

Then there is a symmetry-breaking or dichotomisation. One becomes two, as in dialectical thesis and antithesis. You get complementary bounds emerging - as in canonically, the local and global scales that are the basis of a triadic hierarchical organisation. See Stan Salthe on his basic triadic system in his classic, Evolving Hierarchical Systems.

So the emergent model is the Peircean one of an unbroken potential that breaks and separates in opposite directions, and having done that, becomes stratified because the two tendencies thus created get mixed - go to statistical equilibrium - across all available scales.

And it is very easy to read this into current world affairs. For instance, we have had 30 years of economic globalisation. And the natural response to that is a new call for economic localisation.

This is being read as a pendulum swing in politics. We went one way, now we must go the other. But really, political attention should be focused on the systems fact that an economic agenda predicated on liberated growth is going to go strongly in both these directions anyway. That is predictable. What will vanish from the system is the middle ground. Or rather, any proper mean or average scale of economic action.

So it is not either/or, but both - and both being expressed across all available scales of organisation. And we can then measure a "fully stratified" hierarchical organisation in terms of its approach to this powerlaw ideal of having no actual mean.

A non-growth system would be characterised by approaching the Gaussian limit of a precisely specified mean. A free-growth system does the opposite. And understanding this is pretty important if you want to have a sensible political conversation about the emergence of radical wealth inequality, or the "surprising" disappearance of the middle class.

A non-growth system would be characterised by approaching the Gaussian limit of a precisely specified mean. A free-growth system does the opposite. — apokrisis

So for instance when mass communication was limited to a small number of broadcast media, TV, local radio, local newspapers, then you expect a Gaussian distribution in people's knowledge of current events, sports, entertainment: most would have moderate levels of knowledge, and very few little or lots. Right so far?

Once communication channels start proliferating, we see power-law distributions instead, right? In the past, lots of people knew at least a little about the Brooklyn Dodgers, few knew nothing, and few knew a lot. Nowadays, there could be some artist that a small number of people know tons about, but almost everyone knows almost nothing.

Am I getting this right?

Am I getting this right? — Srap Tasmaner

That's it. The popular account of all this has been the talk about fat-tail distributions, or seven degrees of separation - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/magazine/08wwln-safire-t.html?mcubz=1

Or as I mentioned, Taleb's Black Swan. Or "disintermediation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation

So everyone is picking up on what is happening with the internet and now social media. People are inventing terminology left, right and centre.

That makes it rather hard to see that this is not just about the web. It is an absolutely generic self-organisational story.

Again, that Franks' article is excellent in identifying the fact that we are talking of two contrasting probabilistic regimes in nature - where before people thought there was only really the one, the good old bell curve. Now we are seeing that powerlaw (or log/log) statistics are not some kind of weird exception, but the other natural limit.

Instead of trying to assimilate all structure to Gaussian outcomes. we should expect nature to be fractal, scalefree, hierarchical, exhibit fluctuations over all scales, simply because of emergent probability.

Powerlaw behaviour is in fact more normal or basic as it is less constrained. It is the first stage of order that you get because "free growth", or dissipative structure, is the simplest form of emergent organisation. It takes the addition of limits on growth to then start to get Gaussian closed system behaviour where fixed limits force the system towards a single-scale mean.

Metaphysically, this is revolutionary. The Second Law of Thermodynamics would no longer be fundamental as it describes an already closed world in which entropy has an average. The lid has been put on the pot, as it were. Instead, you need a modified law - one based on dissipative structure, or Prigogine's "far from equilibrium" systems - that starts with powerlaw behaviour.

So Gaussian probability - the central limit theorem - was worked out first. But it is the more constrained statistical situation. We are now working out the models of statistics with the least possible constraints. And so while powerlaw behaviour seems weird and exceptional, it is really the more generic case in nature.

And so while powerlaw behaviour seems weird and exceptional, it is really the more generic case in nature — apokrisis

Even the Wikipedia's article is staggering in the number and range of examples.