Tag Archives: Project

Replication Markets Team Seeks Journal Partners for Replication Trial

By Robin Hanson · January 8, 2019 1:20 pm · Comments (2)

An open letter, from myself and a few colleagues:

Recent attempts to systematically replicate samples of published experiments in the social and behavioral sciences have revealed disappointingly low rates of replication. Many parties are discussing a wide range of options to address this problem.

Surveys and prediction markets have been shown to predict, at rates substantially better than random, which experiments will replicate. This suggests a simple strategy by which academic journals could increase the rate at which their published articles replicate. For each relevant submitted article, create a prediction market estimating its chance of replication, and use that estimate as one factor in deciding whether to publish that article.

We the Replication Markets Team seek academic journals to join us in a test of this strategy. We have been selected for an upcoming DARPA program to create prediction markets for several thousand scientific replication experiments, many of which could be based on articles submitted to your journal. Each market would predict the chance of an experiment replicating. Of the already-published experiments in the pool, approximately one in ten will be sampled randomly for replication. (Whether submitted papers could be included in the replication pool depends on other teams in the program.) Our past markets have averaged 70% accuracy, and the work is listed at the Science Prediction Market Project page, and has been published in Science, PNAS, and Royal Society Open Science.

While details are open to negotiation, our initial concept is that your journal would tell potential authors that you are favorably inclined toward experiment article submissions that are posted at our public archive of submitted articles. By posting their article, authors declare that they have submitted their article to some participating journal, though they need not say which one. You tell us when you get a qualifying submission, we quickly tell you the estimated chance of replication, and later you tell us of your final publication decision.

At this point in time we seek only an expression of substantial interest that we can take to DARPA and other teams. Details that may later be negotiated include what exactly counts as a replication, whether archived papers reveal author names, how fast we respond with our replication estimates, what fraction of your articles we actually attempt to replicate, and whether you privately give us any other quality indicators obtained in your reviews to assist in our statistical analysis.

Please RSVP to: Angela Cochran, PM acochran@replicationmarkets.com 571 225 1450

Sincerely, the Replication Markets Team

Thomas Pfeiffer (Massey University)
Yiling Chen, Yang Liu, and Haifeng Xu (Harvard University)
Anna Dreber Almenberg & Magnus Johannesson (Stockholm School of Economics)
Robin Hanson & Kathryn Laskey (George Mason University)

Added 2p: We plan to forecast ~8,000 replications over 3 years, ~2,000 within the first 15 months.  Of these, ~5-10% will be selected for an actual replication attempt.

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Toward An Honest Consensus

By Robin Hanson · December 31, 2018 3:15 pm · Comments (2)

Star Trek original series featured a smart computer that mostly only answered questions; humans made key decisions. Near the start of Nick Chater’s book The Mind Is Flat, which I recently started, he said early AI visions were based on the idea of asking humans questions, and then coding their answers into a computer, which might then answer the same range of questions when asked. But to the surprise of most, typical human beliefs turned out to be much too unstable, unreliable, incoherent, and just plain absent to make this work. So AI research turned to other approaches.

Which makes sense. But I’m still inspired by that ancient vision of an explicit accessible shared repository of what we all know, even if that isn’t based on AI. This is the vision that to varying degrees inspired encyclopedias, libraries, internet search engines, prediction markets, and now, virtual assistants. How can we all coordinate to create and update an accessible shared consensus on important topics?

Yes, today our world contains many social institutions that, while serving other functions, also function to create and update a shared consensus. While we don’t all agree with such consensus, it is available as a decent first estimate for those who do not specialize in a topic, facilitating an intellectual division of labor.

For example: search engines, academia, news media, encyclopedias, courts/agencies, consultants, speculative markets, and polls/elections. In many of these institutions, one can ask questions, find closest existing answers, induce the creation of new answers, induce elaboration or updates of older answers, induce resolution of apparent inconsistencies between existing answers, and challenge existing answers with proposed replacements. Allowed questions often include meta questions such as origins of, translations of, confidence in, and expected future changes in, other questions.

These existing institutions, however, often seem weak and haphazard. They often offer poor and biased incentives, use different methods for rather similar topics, leave a lot of huge holes where no decent consensus is offered, and tolerate many inconsistencies in the answers provided by different parts. Which raises the obvious question: can we understand the advantages and disadvantages of existing methods in different contexts well enough to suggest which ones we should use more or less where, or to design better variations, ones that offer stronger incentives, lower costs, and wider scope and integration?

Of course computers could contribute to such new institutions, but they needn’t be the only or even main parts. And of course the idea here is to come up with design candidates to test first at small scales, scaling up only when results look promising. Design candidates will seem more promising if we can at least imagine using them more widely, and if they are based on theories that plausibly explain failings of existing institutions. And of course I’m not talking about pressuring people to follow a consensus, just to make a consensus available to those who want to use it.

As usual, a design proposal should roughly describe what acts each participant can do when, what they each know about what others have done, and what payoffs they each get for the main possible outcomes of typical actions. All in a way that is physically, computationally, and financially feasible. Of course we’d like a story about why equilibria of such a system are likely to produce accurate answers fast and at low cost, relative to other possible systems. And we may need to also satisfy hidden motives, the unacknowledged reasons for why people actually like existing institutions.

I have lots of ideas for proposals I’d like the world to consider here. But I realized that perhaps I’ve neglected calling attention to the problem itself. So I’ve written this post in the hope of inspiring some of you with a challenge: can you help design (or test) new robust ways to create and update a social consensus?

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Choose: Allies or Accuracy

By Robin Hanson · December 28, 2018 12:15 pm · Comments (3)

Imagine that person A tells you something flattering or unflattering about person B. All else equal, this should move your opinion of B in the direction of A’s claim. But how far? If you care mainly about accuracy, you’ll want to take into account base rates on claimers A and targets B, as well as more specific specific signs on the accuracy of A regarding B.

But what if you care mainly about seeming loyal to your allies? Well if A is more of your ally than is B, as suggested by your listening now to A, then you’ll be more inclined to just believe A, no matter what. Perhaps if other allies give a different opinion, you’ll have to decide which of your allies to back. But if not, trying to be accurate on B mainly risks seeming disloyal to A and you’re other allies.

It seems that humans tend to just believe gossip like this, mostly ignoring signs of accuracy:

The trustworthiness of person-related information … can vary considerably, as in the case of gossip, rumors, lies, or “fake news.” …. Social–emotional information about the (im)moral behavior of previously unknown persons was verbally presented as trustworthy fact (e.g., “He bullied his apprentice”) or marked as untrustworthy gossip (by adding, e.g., allegedly), using verbal qualifiers that are frequently used in conversations, news, and social media to indicate the questionable trustworthiness of the information and as a precaution against wrong accusations. In Experiment 1, spontaneous likability, deliberate person judgments, and electrophysiological measures of emotional person evaluation were strongly influenced by negative information yet remarkably unaffected by the trustworthiness of the information. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and extended them to positive information. Our findings demonstrate a tendency for strong emotional evaluations and person judgments even when they are knowingly based on unclear evidence. (more; HT Rolf Degen)

I’ve toyed with the idea of independent juries to deal with Twitter mobs. Pay a random jury a modest amount to 1) read a fuller context and background on the participants, 2) talk a bit among themselves, and then 3) choose which side they declare as more reasonable. Sure sometimes the jury would hang, but often they could give a voice of reason that might otherwise be drown out by loud participants. I’d have been willing to pay for this a few times. And once juries became a standard thing, we could lower costs via making prediction markets on jury verdicts if a case were randomly choose for jury evaluation.

But alas, I’m skeptical that most would care much about what an independent jury is estimated to say, or even about what it actually says. For that, they’d have to care more about truth than about showing support for allies.

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Open Policy Evaluation

By Robin Hanson · November 27, 2018 8:15 pm · Comments (1)

Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue. La Rochefoucauld, Maximes

In some areas of life, you need connections to do anything. Invitations to parties, jobs, housing, purchases, business deals, etc. are all gained via private personal connections. In other areas of life, in contrast, invitations are made open to everyone. Posted for all to see are openings for jobs, housing, products to buy, business investment, calls for proposals for contracts and grants, etc. The connection-only world is often suspected of nepotism and corruption, and “reforms” often take the form of requiring openings to be posted so that anyone can apply.

In academia, we post openings for jobs, school attendance, conference attendance, journal publications, and grant applications for all to see. Even though most people know that you’ll actually need personal connections to have much of a chance for many of these things. People seems to want to appear willing to consider an application from anyone. They allow some invitation-only conferences, talk series, etc., but usually insist that such things are incidental, not central to their profession.

This preference for at least an appearance of openness suggests a general strategy of reform: find things that are now only gained via personal connections, and create an alternate open process whereby anyone can officially apply. In this post, I apply this idea to: policy proposals.

Imagine that you have a proposal for a better policy, to be used by governments, businesses, or other organizations. How can you get people to listen to your proposal, and perhaps endorse it or apply it? You might try to use personal connections to get an audience with someone at a government agency, political interest group, think tank, foundation, or business. But that’s stuck in the private connection world. You might wait for an agency or foundation to put out an open call for proposals, seeking a solution to exactly the problem your proposal solves. But for any one proposal idea, you might wait a very long time.

You might submit an article to an open conference or journal, or submit a book to a publisher. But if they accept your submission, that mostly won’t be an endorsement of whether your proposal is good policy by some metric. Publishers are mostly looking at other criteria, such as whether you have an impressive study using difficult methods, or whether you have a book thesis and writing style that will attract many readers.

So I propose that we consider creating an open process for submitting policy proposals to be evaluated, in the hope of gaining some level of endorsement and perhaps further action. This process won’t judge your submission on wit, popularity, impressiveness, or analytical rigor. Their key question is: is this promising as a policy proposal to actually adopt, for the purpose of making a better world? If they endorse your proposal, then other actors can use that as a quality signal regarding what policy proposals to consider.

Of course how you judge a policy proposal depends on your values. So there might be different open policy evaluators (OPE) based on different sets of values. Each OPE needs to have some consistent standards by which they evaluate proposals. For example, economists might ask whether a proposal improves economic efficiency, libertarians might ask if it increases liberty, and progressives might ask whether it reduces inequality.

Should the evaluation of a proposal consider whether there’s a snowball chance in hell of a proposal being actually adopted, or even officially considered? That is, whether it is in the “Overton window”? Should they consider whether you have so far gained sufficient celebrity endorsements to make people pay attention to your proposal? Well, those are choices of evaluation criteria. I’m personally more interested in evaluating proposals regardless of who has supported them, and regardless of their near-term political feasibility. Like how academics say we do today with journal article submissions. But that’s just me.

An OPE seems valid and useful as long as its actual choices of which policies it endorses match its declared evaluation criteria. Then it can serve as a useful filter, between people with innovative policy ideas and policy customers seeking useful ideas to consider and perhaps implement. If you can find OPEs who share your evaluation criteria, you can consider the policies they endorse. And of course if we ever end up having many of them, you could focus first on the most prestigious ones.

Ideally an OPE would have funding from some source to pay for its evaluations. But I could also imagine applicants having to pay a fee to have their proposals considered.

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Toward Micro-Likes

By Robin Hanson · March 29, 2018 10:47 am · Comments (9)

Long ago when electricity and phones were new, they were largely unregulated, and privately funded. But then as the tech (and especially the interfaces) stopped changing so fast, and showed big scale and network economies, regulation stepped in. Today social media still seems new. But as it hasn’t been changing as much lately, and it also shows large scale and network economies, many are talking now about heavier regulation. In this post, let me suggest that a lot more change is possible; we aren’t near the sort of stability that electricity and phones reached when they became heavily regulated.

Back in the early days of the web and internet people predicted many big radical changes. Yet few then mentioned social media, the application now most strongly associated with this new frontier. What did we miss? The usual story, which I find plausible, is that we missed just how much people love to get many frequent signals of their social connections: likes, retweets, etc. Social media gives us more frequent “attaboy” and “we see & like you” signals. People care more than we realized about the frequency, relative to the size, of such signals.

But if that’s the key lesson, social media should be able to move a lot further in this direction. For example, today Facebook has two billion monthly users and produces four million likes per minute, for an average of about three likes per day per monthly user. Twitter has 300 million monthly users, who send 500 million tweets per day, for less than two tweets per day per monthly user. (I can’t find stats on Twitter likes or retweets.) Which I’d say is actually a pretty low rate of positive feedback.

Imagine you had a wall-sized screen, full of social media items, and that while you browsed this wall the direction of your gaze was tracked continuously to see which items your gaze was on or near. From that info, one could give the authors or subjects of those items far more granular info on who is paying how much attention to them. Not only on how often how much your stuff is watched, but also on the mood and mental state of those watchers. If some of those items were continuous video feeds from other people, then those others could be producing many more social media items to which others could attend.

Also, so far we’ve usually just naively counted likes, retweets, etc., as if everyone counted the same. But we could instead use non-uniform weights based on popularity or other measures. And given how much people like to participate in synchronized rituals, we could also create and publicize statistics on what groups of people are how synchronized in their social media actions. And offer new tools to help them synchronize more finely.

My point here isn’t to predict or recommend specific changes for future social media. I’m instead just trying to make the point that a lot of room for improvement remains. Such gains might be delayed or prevented by heavy regulation.

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The Model to Beat: Status Rank

By Robin Hanson · March 4, 2018 11:15 am · Comments (20)

There’s been much discussion of income inequality over the last few years. However, I just randomly came across what should be a seminal related result, published in 2010 but mostly ignored. Let me do my bit to fix that.

People often presume that policy can mostly ignore income inequality if key individual outcomes like health or happiness depend mainly on individual income. Yes, there may be some room for promoting insurance against income risk, but not much room. However, people often presume that policy should pay a lot more attention to inequality if individual outcomes depend more directly on the income of others, such as via envy or discouragement.

However, there’s a simple and plausible income interdependence scenario where inequality matters little for policy: when outcomes depend on rank. If individual outcomes are a function of each person’s percentile income rank, and if social welfare just adds up those individual outcomes, then income policy becomes irrelevant, because this social welfare sum is guaranteed to always add up to the same constant. Income-related policy may influence outcomes via other channels, but not via this channel. This applies whether the relevant rank is global, comparing each person to the entire world, or local, comparing each person only to a local community.

That 2010 paper, by Christopher Boyce, Gordon Brown, and Simon Moore, makes a strong case that in fact the outcome of life satisfaction depends on the incomes of others only via income rank. (Two followup papers find the same result for outcomes of psychological distress and nine measures of health.) They looked at 87,000 Brits, and found that while income rank strongly predicted outcomes, neither individual (log) income nor an average (log) income of their reference group predicted outcomes, after controlling for rank (and also for age, gender, education, marital status, children, housing ownership, labor-force status, and disabilities). These seem to me remarkably strong and robust results. (Confirmed here.)

The irrelevance of individual income and reference group income remained true whether the group within which a person was ranked was the entire sample, one of 19 geographic regions, one of 12 age groups, or one of six gender-schooling groups. This suggests that the actual relevant comparison group is relatively narrow. If people cared mainly about their global rank in the whole sample, then analyses of rank within groups should have missed an effect of the rank of the group, which should have appeared as an effect of reference group income. But such effects weren’t seen.

It these statistical models were the correct model of the world, then income policy could only include influence social welfare via the control variables of age, gender, education, marital status, children, housing ownership, labor-force status, and disabilities. You couldn’t improve social welfare directly by redistributing income, though redistribution or taxation might help by changing control variables.

But even that conclusion seems premature. The key idea here is that people care about their social status rank, and income should only be one of many factors contributing to social status. So we should really be looking at models where all of a person’s observable features can contribute to their status. For each feature, such as personality or marital status, we should ask if our data is best described as that factor contributing directly to social status, which is then ranked to produce individual outcomes, or whether that factor also influences individual outcomes via some other channel, that doesn’t pass through social status. It is only effects via those other channels that might change overall social welfare.

This seems a straightforward statistical exercise, at least for someone with access to relevant data. Who’s up for it?

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All Pay Liability

By Robin Hanson · November 3, 2017 4:00 pm · Comments (34)

We could raise government revenue much more efficiently than we now do, with less damage to the economy for any given amount of revenue raised. For example, we could tax fixed characteristics like height instead of income, we could tax traffic congestion a lot more, and we could do better at taxing pollution, including carbon. Recently I posted on a more efficient system of property taxes, that allows more revenue to be raised at a lower cost. Today, I’ll post on a more efficient system of accident liability, which similarly raises more revenue at a lower cost.

Some don’t want me to talk about these things. They hope to “starve the beast” by drying up government revenue sources. That seems to me a lost cause, the sort of logic that pushed radicals toward generic destruction, hoping that eventually the masses would get fed up and revolt. I instead expect a better world overall if governments adopt more efficient policies, including more efficient tax policies.

Regarding accident liability, we want a system that will encourage good levels of care and activity by all who can influence accident rates. For example, regarding car accidents we want drivers to pick good car models, speeds, sleep, and maintenance frequencies. We also want them to take into account the possibility of hurting others via accidents when they choose how often they drive. In addition, we want a system that induces fewer actual court cases, which are expensive, and that asks courts to make fewer judgements, in which they might err.

The simplest system is no liability. Courts just don’t get involved. This has the lowest possible rate of court cases, namely zero. It creates good incentives for accident victims to set their care and activity levels well, but gives rather poor incentives for others to set such things well.

The next simplest system is strict liability. This induces good care and activity by potential injurers, but not from potential victims. It also induces a high rate of court cases; nearly every accident results in a lawsuit. While the parties might settle out of court, if a case goes to trial the court must determine responsibility, i.e., who caused the accident, and how much damages the victim suffered as a result.

Relative to strict liability, systems of negligence cut the rate of court cases, but at the cost of asking courts to make more judgements. As with strict liability, courts must judge who is responsible and victim damage levels. But in addition, courts must also ask themselves if that injurer took enough care to prevent the accident. For each of visible parameter, the courts must judge both the actual level of care taken, and the optimal level of care.If the injurer took enough care overall, that injurer does not owe damages. And if that no damages situation is the usual case, there are fewer court cases, as there are fewer lawsuits.

In practice, however, courts can only look at a small number of injurer choice parameters visible enough to them, such as driving speed. Far more parameters, including all injurer activity level parameters, remain invisible, and so are not considered. Negligence doesn’t create good incentives to set all those less visible parameters.

There are standard variations on these systems, such as allowing contributory negligence on the part of the victim. But all of these systems fail to induce optimal levels of care and activity in someone. We have long known, however, of a simple system that gets pretty much all of these things right, and in addition only asks courts to judge who is responsible for an accident and victim damage levels. (I didn’t invent this system; it is mentioned in many law & econ texts.) In this simple system, courts do not need to consider anyone’s actual or ideal levels of care or activity.

This simple system is to make all responsible parties pay the damage levels of all other parties hurt by the accident. The trick is that they pay all of these amounts to the government, instead of to each other. As each party now internalizes all of the damage suffered by all of the parties, they should choose all their private care and activity levels well. And the government gets more revenue to boot.

The big problem with this all-pay liability system is that none of these responsible parties, including the victims, want to report this accident to the government. They’d all rather pretend it didn’t happen. So the government needs some other way to find out about accidents. In dense areas where they government already has access to mass surveillance systems, they can just use those systems. In other areas, governments might offer bounties to third parties who report accidents, and put strong penalties on those who fail to report their own accidents. Or the system might revert to other liability rules in contexts where governments might otherwise detect accidents too infrequently.

With all-pay liability, we expect a lawsuit for every accident. But in that suit the courts only need to judge who is responsible and victim damage levels. No other judgements need be made. So if we could find simple streamlined ways to make these judgements, this system might not be that expensive to administer. And then we’d have both better accident prevention and more available government revenue.

(Yes, people might want to buy insurance against the risk of making these payments. Yes, if multiple parties could coordinate to prevent accidents together, this system might induce them to spend too much on prevention. Hopefully we could identify such efforts and treat them differently.)

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Design A Better Chess

By Robin Hanson · May 22, 2017 9:00 am · Comments (33)

Friday the Wall Street Journal published my review of Garry Kasparov’s new book Deep Thinking. I end with:

I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the high status of chess champions, whom many consider intellectuals (rather than, say, sports stars). But in “Deep Thinking,” Mr. Kasparov has changed my mind. He praises Mikhail Botvinnik, the founder of the Soviet chess school where he trained, for practicing an “intense regime of self-criticism.” Chess champions are rewarded for brutal honesty about their habits and strategies. If only most tenured professors and business executives were this conscious of their limitations and blind spots.

“Few young stars in any discipline are aware of why they excel,” Mr. Kasparov writes. Like Mr. Kasparov, I don’t know why he was great. But I know now why I’m glad we have him. We need at least a few of our most celebrated minds to be this intellectually honest with themselves, and with us.

While all sports reward honesty and self-criticism on your sports performance, in more intellectual sports that honesty can more influence your opinions on more important topics. Which raises the question: can we design a game that promotes even more useful honestly? As I spent some of my youth doing game design, and had a friend who shared that interest, I know that designing games is hard; there are many relevant constraints of which most players are unaware (see the usual literature). For this game design task, all those usual constraints apply, and we must attend to some added criteria:

  • Relevant: We’d like the topics where this game rewards insight and understanding to be closer to the topics that matter, where brutal honesty would be more useful to the world.
  • Fair: Even with relevant topics, the game can’t seem to greatly favor people who by class or culture get much more direct personal info and experience regarding those relevant topics. Anyone should be able to learn the game by playing it.
  • Fragmented: Performance must be broken into many little games, where winning one game gives little or no direct advantage in future games. Thus consistent wins allow strong inferences on underlying ability.
  • Isolated: Players can’t easily get help from hidden allies outside the game.
  • Status: Chess is seen as very high status, because so many high status people have treated it as high status for so long. Somehow this new game needs to have a shot at achieving a status that high.

If these criteria could be met, high capability people might try to achieve status by consistently winning at this game, the opinions they generate on relevant topics might be more honest and accurate, and the rest of us might then be more inclined to listen to those accurate and relevant opinions.

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Trade Engagement?

By Robin Hanson · December 30, 2016 10:50 am · Comments (33)

First, let me invite readers, especially longtime/frequent readers, to suggest topics for me to blog on. I try to pick topics that are important, neglected, and where I can find something original and insightful to say. But I also like to please readers, and maybe I’m forgetting/missing topics that you could point out.

Second, many of my intellectual projects remain limited by a lack of engagement. I can write books, papers, and blog posts, but to have larger intellectual impact I need people to engage my ideas. Not to agree or disagree with them, but to dive into and critique the details of my arguments, and then publicly describe their findings. (Yes, journal referees engage submissions to some extent, but it isn’t remotely enough.)

This is more useful to me when such engagers have more relevant ability, popularity, and/or status. Since I also have modest ability, popularity, and status, at least in some areas, this suggests the possibility of mutually beneficial trade. I engage your neglected ideas and you engage mine. Of course there are many details to work out to arrange such trade.

First, there’s timing. I don’t want to put in lots of work engaging your ideas based on a promise that you’ll later engage mine, and then have you renege. So we may need to start small, back and forth. Or you can go first.

Second, there’s the issue of relative price. If we have differing levels of ability, popularity, and status, then we should agree to differing relative efforts to reflect those differences. If you are more able than I, maybe I should engage several ideas of yours in trade for your only engaging one of mine.

Third, we may disagree about our relevant differences. While it may be easy to quickly demonstrate one’s popularity, status, and overall intelligence, it can be harder to demonstrate one’s other abilities relevant to a particular topic. Yes if I read a bunch of your papers I might be able to see that your ability is higher than your status would suggest, but I might not have time for that.

Fourth, we may each fear adverse selection. Why should I be so stupid as to join a club that would stoop so low as to consider me as a member? The fact that you are seeking to trade for engagement, and willing to consider me as a trading partner, makes me suspect that your ideas, ability, and status are worse than they appear.

Fifth, we might prefer to disguise our engagement trade. When engagement is often a side effect of other processes, then it might look bad to go out of your way to trade engagements. (Trading engagement for money or sex probably looks even worse.) So people may prefer to hide their engagement trades within other process that give plausible deniability about such trades. I just happened to invite you to talk at my seminar series after you invited me to talk at yours; move along, no trade to see here.

These are substantial obstacles, and may together explain the lack of observed engagement trades. Even so, I suspect people haven’t tried very hard to overcome such obstacles, and in the spirit of innovation I’m willing to explore such possibilities, at least a bit. My neglected ideas include em futures, hidden motives, decision markets, irrational disagreement, mangled worlds, and more.

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Community Watchers

By Robin Hanson · July 17, 2016 5:20 pm · Comments (13)

In my youth, I was skeptical of things I could not see. Like community social health. Not just physical health, but social health, and not just of individuals, but of communities. But now that I am older and can see more, I am convinced: communities exist, and matter. Not just very visible things like jobs, parks, houses, and stores. But harder to see coalitions, cultures, and norms that influence how people feel about and treat each other.

In some places people more often see when someone is hurting, and try to help. Or stop predators on the prowl. Or see other big changes for mutual gain, and coordinate to achieve them. In other places, these happen less. This sort of community health varies not just from city to city, or firm to firm, but from block to block, and from one cubicle row to cubicle row.

If you live in a place for a while, and you are mature enough to see the local social fabric, then you may see your local social health. And while you might want government to help with this, distant government officials managed by and via formal rules can’t do much. Sincere competent local community activists can do more. But while some can choose to become these, it can be hard for others to tell who they are, to support them. What else can we do?

Many people like to travel, and wish somehow to combine travel with doing good. Many also like the idea of secret societies, especially ones devoted to noble causes. I see an opening here for a secret society of travelers devoted to improving community social health.

The idea is simple: a secret society evaluates the local health of communities they visit, and combines these ratings into a public map. If this map came to be seen as reliable, it could shame poor communities into doing more to improve their health. With residents preferring to move to better communities, land owners would gain stronger incentives to promote improvements.

This would not be easy. Society members must be socially perceptive, stay long enough at each place to evaluate well, overcome temptations to push various other agendas and biases in their evaluations, and avoid detection. And they must find ways to collect new similarly virtuous members, even after their society becomes prestigious. This is a tall order.

But the payoff could be huge: healthier communities. If you try to create this, my only advice is: first collect a big enough map in secret and then test it in many ways for accuracy before going public. It isn’t enough that you hope you will be able to do this; wait until you have actually done it.

From a July 14 conversation with Pete Bertine and Andrew Lockhart.

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