[SydPhil] University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series, Chad Lee-Stronach, (Northeastern University)

[Ryan Cox]

Hi everyone,

This week's speaker in the University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series is Chad Lee-Stronach, (Northeastern University)

The title of the talk is "The Tragedy of the Conventions” (co-authored with Rory Smead).  Here is an abstract for the talk:

Many pressing social problems require coordinated changes across multiple interconnected domains. Climate action, for instance, requires simultaneous transitions in energy, transportation, agriculture, and consumer behavior, where success in each domain depends on progress in others. We ask: under what conditions can socially optimal coordination across domains emerge and persist? We formalize this challenge as the "problem of interdependent conventions'' using evolutionary game theory. Our analysis reveals a deeper challenge than previously recognized: interdependence creates qualitatively different coordination challenges than independent domains. Rather than converging to optimal or suboptimal outcomes, interdependent systems can become trapped in stable partial coordination—some domains succeed while other remain permanently stuck—or fail to coordinate at all. We show that conditional cooperation mechanisms---contingent agreements, signaling platforms, and staged protocols—can work under special conditions. But three structural problems prevent their general implementation: (1) Heterogeneity Trap: domains starting below critical cooperation thresholds remain trapped while others succeed; (2) Bootstrap Paradox: implementing the coordination mechanism requires the very coordination capacity it is meant to create; and (3) Temporal Gap: threshold-crossing requires substantially stronger interdependence than static analysis predicts, as committed actors erode before coordination emerges. These results suggest that the tragedy of the conventions is not that solutions do not exist, but that implementing them requires the very coordination capacity that interdependences make unattainable.

The seminar will take place at 3:30pm on Wednesday Oct 22 in the Philosophy Seminar Room (N494).

Enquiries about the seminar series can be directed to ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au

Ryan Cox
Lecturer in Philosophy
Discipline of Philosophy
School of Humanities
University of Sydney
ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au