Collective Action Course — Outline Braindump (2026-09-11)

Raw outflow, lightly tidied. Original language kept as much as possible.

Format

My general model, just so the structure is not in the README: this is going to be 6 sessions, probably 1.5 hours each. It's more for me to develop the material, but also to present it. It's how I did the Developmental Spaces course last year, by giving the talk. The talk and the series I'm developing are a structure idea.

I might do a model where I have actually prepared material for people if I could do that in time, and then mainly the session is discussion — if that would work. Or I might just lecture during the session more, realistically, and improvise.

Intent

I want to introduce people to the idea of collective action and apply it. In our general civilizational renaissance thinking, collective action is the central pattern of dysfunction. Maybe I want to develop that connection further at some point in the course as background.

Essentially, I want to provide an introduction to collective action, really quite thoroughly, and also give engaging examples of how this happens and how we solve larger and larger collective action problems. It's also not just about problems; it's about collective action opportunities.

Today I want to try and outline an arc of the course. At a later point I want to do research and come up with examples. I want to go for motivated examples or things at the beginning.

Goal for today: a written-up landing page for the course that people could therefore join, in more detail. I've got the outline I put in the README, but I'd actually like to roughly indicate what the sessions are about — 5 or 6 sessions, just to throw out ideas.

Opening examples (motivating)

What comes to me first are examples at the beginning that motivate.

Horatio on the Bridge.
The film about environmental activists who are working to destroy property of people they think are logging. It's a good example where they get caught, and then they end up betraying each other in a classic prisoner's dilemma. The irony is kind of amazing, and I think that film would be a great starting point for a preliminary thing for the course.
I want other good examples, video clips — even animals cooperating, e.g. foraging animals like cows coming together to fight off a predator.
Both successes and failures.

After part one — just the introduction and some trailing examples: the AI arms race, nuclear weapons, and many other examples of collective action problems with real application. Then I want to come to the challenges, so I want to introduce it a bit more rigorously.

Aside: possibly a critique of the concept of Moloch. Even though I might use it in the course title — or maybe I avoid using it in the course title because I don't like it.

Part two: the game theory

Basic rational actors. Something to get across is that it's not a deficiency. It kind of makes sense — and we have the ability to cooperate.

Then: how do we solve collective action problems? Or maybe the other way around — it's not a collective action problem, it's a collective action opportunity. The default is the bad state; rather than frame it as "there's a good state and we fall into the bad", ask: what's the bad state, and how do we get into the good?

Aside: agriculture is kind of the full story narrative. Hunter-gatherers actually had a pretty good life, and then there was this fall into agriculture, which was also a collective action failure. Maybe that's the way — collective action failures, collective action successes. There's also a reframing of the course in that way.

How we succeed

Having examined the basic game theory, we probably want to come to the folk theorem: repeated interaction can work. What are the components that go into that — observability and monitoring, repeated interaction, being in groups and interacting.

Cultural evolution

At some point I want to segue to the Henrich story of the WEIRDest People in the World — that there is this cultural evolution towards trusting strangers, and these are deep shifts.

The Bali water temples.
The Ilahita story: how do we build larger groups that cooperate?
A nod to Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety — war as the catalyst of larger and larger group sizes, larger and larger sets of cooperation.

Where I want to end up

The need for planetary cooperation. And when we say that, we need a planetary religion — something that binds us together as humanity. We've begun that in modernity: we're all brothers and sisters, there are human rights and so on. But there's something maybe bigger now. We take our hands into being a love letter to an Earth ending.

That's why I want to end the course there. What I'm trying to say is that it's these innovations in cultural paradigms that take us to larger and larger group sizes. This is an integral point, really, of how we enlarge the zone of our moral concern and care — at each stage of the cultural paradigm, when we switch from pre-modernity to modernity and so on, we are enlarging our sphere of concern.

To do later

Research and collect examples, video clips.
Decide on the title (Moloch or not).
Decide prep-material vs. lecture-and-discuss format.