X has seen an ongoing debate about the extent to which last night’s debate debacle was planned.
Some say it’s all planned and coordinated. Others believe this is just “emergent.”
Is this a meaningful debate? If so, how can we tell which is which?
Why does coordination even matter?
The extent of coordination is actually the extent of group intelligence and planning ability. An uncoordinated group is unintelligent, only able to react to what is right in front of it like a bunch of animals. A coordinated group is intelligent and can plan out chains of events and contingencies in advance.
The emergence hypothesis claims that what happened is like this:
Short sighted individuals planned the debate without thinking of the group level ramifications
The average individual in the Democratic group was shocked at Biden’s poor performance
The average reaction is to write articles about Biden stepping down. Nobody was discussing getting Biden to step down before the debate because the group is too uncoordinated to collectively think about the consequences of the debate at the level of the group
Whereas the coordination hypothesis posits:
Those who put on the debate also envisioned that Biden would perform poorly.
They planned ahead of time to use the debate to get him to step down
It went according to plan
In this case, the “group” is more or less the Democratic Party aligned media (CNN, MSNBC, NYT, Forbes, The Atlantic, The Hill, etc). So we must ask, did members of the media foresee Biden performing poorly?
Thinking about coordination rationally
The group is really composed of a set of individuals. Ironically, what is important for the hypotheses above is less how much these individuals talk to each other and more how much each individual plans ahead.
If the average journalist predicted Biden would perform poorly and planned to write articles about him stepping down, then the group is on aggregate quite intelligent and capable of planning ahead to this extent. It is likely that those who set up the debate, being in the group, thought the same thing and therefore in part set it up planning to react this way.
This does not mean that the group orchestrated the debate in order to make Biden step down, only that, given all outside pressures, the average member decided that hosting the debate and using it to pressure Biden to step down was better than not hosting it and either pressuring him to step down or not pressuring him. Clearly, if they saw the outcome, having the debate would be the best way to pressure him to step down. However, it is unclear whether they would prefer to have not had the debate while not pressuring Biden in a vacuum, because it is possible that some outside party like Biden himself wanted the debate to happen, and they had to work with this pressure.
Meanwhile, if the average journalist did not foresee the outcome of the debate, and had no plan or a delusional plan about it (thinking it would go normally like all debates in the past), then this was “emergent”. The reaction would have been drawn up on the fly by the group, seeing the unexpectedly poor performance of Biden. With this group intelligence deficit, the group cannot act optimally and may have burned itself by hosting the debate, whereas if they had planning powers they might have preferred to not host it.
What about communication?
With no communication, the group planning ability will be a probability between 0 and 1, which represents the fraction of the group that can foresee. But with communication, those that can foresee can share their foresight to other members of the group. Some fraction of the remainder will acknowledge the correct foresight.1
It’s pretty obvious that all these people talk within firm quite a bit (imagine saying a company is uncommunicative — then it’s not a company), and probably between firms as well. However, given these firms are quite large, we can see them as sample of the same underlying population. This means their parameters should be approximately the same. Each firm should have roughly the same number of planners and listeners, so between firm communication isn’t needed.
How many people at CNN, the debate host site, could foresee the debacle and how many people listened?
I think the likely answer is between 0 and 1. Why wouldn’t there be group heterogeneity here? Some expected a good performance, some planned this response. Some wanted him to step down, some thought he would do well.
If you have heterogeneity like this, the debate makes sense. A significant fraction is on the kool aid and doesn’t realize Biden is demented. Another fraction knows he’s weak and should step down. These sides cannot see eye to eye on getting him to step down. Suddenly this debate comes along and the kool-aid side thinks it will go swell. The less deluded side could try to block the debate to increase Biden’s chances of winning or could use it to their own advantage over the deluded side.
This is most likely what happened. It’s statistically unlikely everyone is on the exact same page on this. That isn’t a condition for group membership — rather, a certain faction of the liberal media won here, probably with some intermediate amount of foresight that their opposing factions did not achieve.
You could call this the partial coordination view, and it makes more sense than total coordination or total emergence. Under total coordination, why do events have to occur anyway? If everyone is on the same page, just make him step down without a debate. Under total emergence, why are we imagining that above average IQ humans don’t talk to similar peers and think ahead to get what they want? That’s a silly view of human nature.
Under partial coordination, factions within groups coordinate to compete against each other. Events play out as these coordinated factions fight for dominance and favor. They want to break moral and convert other group members to their side as well as gain more outside patronage than their factional opposition. This is most likely the best model of what happened.
Psi = foreseers, gammer = listerners. C_o = fraction of people that can plan accurately through their own minds or listening to others.