[ttiurani]

The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Elinor Ostrom with actual empirical evidence of commons.

The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.

[wongarsu]

A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. The classic examples like people grazing sheep or cutting wood are bad examples that don't really work.

But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. If we define commons a bit more generously it does happen very frequently on the internet. It's also not difficult to find cases of it happening in larger cities, or in environments where cutthroat behavior has been normalized

[TeMPOraL]

> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms.

That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, when everyone knows everyone else personally. It breaks down rapidly after that. We compensate for that with hierarchies of governance, which give rise to written laws and bureaucracy.

New tribes break off old tribes, form alliances, which form larger alliances, and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase.

This is sociopolitical history of the world in a nutshell.

[lukan]

"and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase."

You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions.

Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough.

But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense.

Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again.

(See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.)

[ajuc]

Internet is working exactly the opposite way to what your describing - it's making everything more centralized. Once we had several big media companies in each country and in each big city. Now we have Google and Facebook and tik tok and twitter and then the "whatevers".

NETWORK effect is a real thing

[lukan]

Yes, but there is a difference between having the choice of joining FB or not having a choice at all when the empire comes to claim you (like in Ukraine).

[8note]

FB is part of the empire though, and it is coming for us.

canadians need an anti-imperial radio-canada run alternative. we arent gonna be able to coordinate against the empire when the empire has the main control over the internet.

when the americans come a knocking, we're gonna wish we had chinese radios

[xorcist]

> That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people,

Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.

It's not obvious why some societies break down early and some go on working.

[TeMPOraL]

> Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.

That's more like human universals. These behaviors generally manifest to smaller or larger degree, depending on how secure people feel. But those are extremely local behaviors. And in fact, one of them is exactly the thing I'm talking about:

> we organize

We organize. We organize for many reasons, "general living" is the main one but we're mostly born into it today (few got the chance to be among the founding people of a new village, city or country). But the same patterns show up in every other organizations people create, from companies to charities, from political interests groups to rural housewives' circles -- groups that grow past ~100 people split up. Sometimes into independent groups, sometimes into levels of hierarchies. Observe how companies have regional HQs and departments and areas and teams; religious groups have circuits and congregations, etc. Independent organizations end up creating joint ventures and partnerships, or merge together (and immediately split into a more complex internal structure).

The key factor here is, IMO, for everyone in a given group to be in regular contact with everyone else. Humans are well evolved for living in such small groups - we come with built-in hardware and software to navigate complex interpersonal situations. Alignment around shared goals and implicit rules is natural at this scale. There's no space for cheaters and free-loaders to thrive, because everyone knows everyone else - including the cheater and their victims. However, once the group crosses this "we're all a big family, in it together" size, coordinating everyone becomes hard, and free-loaders proliferate. That's where explicit laws come into play.

This pattern repeats daily, in organizations people create even today.

[AnthonyMouse]

I get the feeling it's the combination of Schelling points and surplus. If everyone else is being pro-social, i.e. there is a culture of it, and the people aren't so hard up that they can reasonably afford to do the same, then that's what happens, either by itself (Hofstadter's theory of superrationality) or via anything so much as light social pressure.

But if a significant fraction of the population is barely scraping by then they're not willing to be "good" if it means not making ends meet, and when other people see widespread defection, they start to feel like they're the only one holding up their end of the deal and then the whole thing collapses.

This is why the tendency for people to propose rent-seeking middlemen as a "solution" to the tragedy of the commons is such a diabolical scourge. It extracts the surplus that would allow things to work more efficiently in their absence.

[vlovich123]

I’ve heard stories from communist villages where everyone knew everyone. Communal parks and property was not respected and frequently vandalized or otherwise neglected because it didn’t have an owner and it was treated as something for someone else to solve.

It’s easier to explain in those terms than assumptions about how things work in a tribe.

[ttiurani]

> But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios.

Commons can fail, but the whole point of Hardin calling commons a "tragedy" is to suggest it necessarily fails.

Compare it to, say, driving. It can fail too, but you wouldn't call it "the tragedy of driving".

We'd be much better off if people didn't throw around this zombie term decades after it's been shown to be unfounded.

[lo_zamoyski]

Even here, the state is the steward of the common good. It is a mistaken notion that the state only exists because people are bad. Even if people were perfectly conscientious and concerned about the common good, you still need a steward. It simply wouldn’t be a steward who would need to use aggressive means to protect the common good from malice or abuse.

[jandrewrogers]

> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario.

No it does not. This sentiment, which many people have, is based on a fictional and idealistic notion of what small communities are like having never lived in such communities.

Empirically, even in high-trust small villages and hamlets where everyone knows everyone, the same incentives exist and the same outcomes happen. Every single time. I lived in several and I can't think of a counter-example. People are highly adaptive to these situations and their basic nature doesn't change because of them.

Humans are humans everywhere and at every scale.

[yellow_postit]

While an earlier poster is over stating Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work — it is regularly shown that averting the tragedy of the commons is not as insurmountable as the original coining of the phrase implied.

[Saline9515]

Ostrom showed that it wasn't necessarily a tragedy, if tight groups involved decided to cooperate. This common in what we call "trust-based societies", which aren't universal.

Nonetheless, the concept is still alive, and anthropic global warming is here to remind you about this.

[dpark]

She not “disprove” the existence of the tragedy of the commons. What she established was that controlling the commons can be done communally rather than through privatization or through government ownership.

Communal management of a resource is still government, though. It just isn’t central government.

The thesis of the tragedy of the commons is that an uncontrolled resource will be abused. The answer is governance at some level, whether individual, collective, or government ownership.

> The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.

Right. And that’s what people are usually talking about when they say “tragedy of the commons”.

[gmfawcett]

Ostrom's results didn't disprove ToC. She showed that common resources can be communally maintained, not that tragic outcomes could never happen.

[8note]

i dont thjnk anything can disprove that ToC issues can happen under any situation.

that seems like an unreasonable bar, and less useful than "does this system make ToC less frequent than that system"

[b00ty4breakfast]

yeah, it's a post-hoc rationalization for the enclosure and privatization of said commons.

[TeMPOraL]

And here I thought the standard, obvious solution to tragedy of the commons is centralized governance.

[b00ty4breakfast]

That is, in fact, how medieval commons were able to exist successfully for hundreds of years.

[dpark]

People invoke the tragedy of the commons in bad faith to argue for privatization because “the alternative is communism”. i.e. Either an individual or the government has to own the resource.

This is of course a false dichotomy because governance can be done at any level.

[AnthonyMouse]

It also seems to omit the possibility that the thing could be privately operated but not for profit.

Let's Encrypt is a solid example of something you could reasonably model as "tragedy of the commons" (who is going to maintain all this certificate verification and issuance infrastructure?) but then it turns out the value of having it is a million times more than the cost of operating it, so it's quite sustainable given a modicum of donations.

Free software licenses are another example in this category. Software frequently has a much higher value than development cost and incremental improvements decentralize well, so a license that lets you use it for free but requires you to contribute back improvements tends to work well because then people see something that would work for them except for this one thing, and it's cheaper to add that themselves or pay someone to than to pay someone who has to develop the whole thing from scratch.