Salutations, all. I'mma scribble this out real fast before I go to bed.

In the book Inadequate Equilibria Elizier Yudkowsky rather casually points out that the coordination problem is a *solved* problem--quote, "Even in my world, Simplicio, coordination isn’t as simple as everyone jumping simultaneously every time one person shouts “Jump!” For coordinated action to be successful, you need to trust the institution that says what the action should be, and a majority of people have to trust that institution, and they have to know that other people trust the institution, so that everyone expects the coordinated action to occur at the critical time, so that it makes sense for them to act too. That’s why we have policy prediction markets and… there doesn’t seem to be a word in your language for the timed-collective-action-threshold-conditional-commitment… hold on, this cultural translator isn’t making any sense. “Kickstarter”? You have the key concept, but you use it mainly for making video games?"

A website that facilitated timed-collective-action-threshold-conditional-commitment for things other than video games would be tremendously useful, I think. Does such a thing currently exist, but I haven't seen it?

This is crossposted from the December career advice thread:

I notice that the thread has gotten long and a lot of people's questions are being buried (one thing I intensely dislike about upvote-style forums is that it isn't trivial to scroll down to the end of the thread and see what's new ("Oh, but you can sort by new if you want to," one replies, and, sure, I guess, but unless everyone else with good opinions does too that doesn't exactly solve the problem, now does it?)). The buried questions don't seem less important than the ones posted first, and I wish I was competent to give expert advice apropos them/had a way to direct the community's gaze to them.

I have a question of my own--regarding changing my undergraduate major--but I'll wait for the January thread to ask it.