- Cognitive actors cannot coordinate through knowledge alone — each holds a private model, and private models must be deliberately aligned.
- The alignment technology spans scales: common ground between two speakers, conventions within a community, myths across millions of strangers.
- These shared structures are the cognitive scaffolding on which every economic mechanism in the framework’s final part is built.
#The claim
Cognitive actors cannot coordinate through knowledge alone. Each is a monad with a private model of the world, and two private models do not align themselves. Coordination requires shared belief systems that align expectations — and the structures that sustain that alignment as conditions change.
Humans discovered the trick early and have been scaling it since: build deliberate structures — myths, conventions, institutions, markets — that align privately-modeled actors far more efficiently than ad hoc agreement ever could. At civilization scale, large-scale cooperation is rooted in common myths: fictions that exist only in collective imagination, yet enable millions of strangers to work toward shared goals.Harari (2015), Sapiens. Shared fictions — money, nations, gods, firms — as the technology of stranger-scale cooperation. At conversational scale, common ground does the same job — shared presuppositions and commitments that let two speakers skip negotiating reality from scratch.Stalnaker (2002), “Common Ground.” Conversation runs on presuppositions both parties treat as already settled.
#The mechanism
Where do these structures come from? Not from decree. Conventions emerge as solutions to coordination problems — stable equilibria where expectations align, and where everyone conforms because everyone expects everyone else to conform.Lewis (1969), Convention. Conventions as self-sustaining equilibria of mutual expectation. Driving on the right is not truer than driving on the left; it is merely settled, and the settlement is the entire value.
Common knowledge then locks alignment in place: agents with shared priors who learn each other’s conclusions cannot rationally agree to disagree — knowing what others know forces convergence.Aumann (1976), “Agreeing to Disagree.” Shared priors plus common knowledge of conclusions leaves no room for rational disagreement. This is why so much coordination machinery — announcements, rituals, public ledgers — exists to make information not just known but known to be known.
Alignment, once achieved, must be maintained. Conditions drift, and communication channels carry the correction traffic — with channel richness determining how much ambiguity a channel can resolve and how much shared understanding it can sustain.Daft & Lengel (1986). Media richness: a channel’s capacity to resolve ambiguity, not just move bits.
#Why it matters
Myths, conventions, and common knowledge are the cognitive scaffolding of coordination. Everything in the framework’s final part stands on them: the scores of Factor 9 are conventions the network honors, the prices of Factor 10 are common knowledge made numeric, and the mechanisms of Factors 11 and 12 are engineered shared structures. Get the scaffolding wrong and no mechanism above it holds; get it right, and a network of private minds starts behaving — without anyone commanding it — like a single system that knows more than any of its parts.
Cognitive actors cannot coordinate through knowledge alone. They require shared belief systems that align expectations and the structures that sustain them. To coordinate at scale, humans build deliberate structures, such as myths, conventions, institutions, and markets, that align privately-modeled actors far more efficiently than ad hoc agreement ever could. Large-scale cooperation is rooted in common myths,1 fictions that exist only in collective imagination yet enable millions to work toward shared goals. At smaller scales, common ground2 reduces coordination overhead through shared presuppositions and commitments. Conventions emerge3 as solutions to coordination problems, the stable equilibria where expectations align. Common knowledge forces convergence,4 because agents with shared priors who learn each other’s conclusions cannot rationally disagree. Communication channels maintain coherence as conditions change, and channel richness5 determines capacity to reduce ambiguity and sustain shared understanding. Myths, conventions, and common knowledge are the cognitive scaffolding of coordination, the shared beliefs on which the economic mechanisms of the next section are built.
References
- Harari, Y. N. 2015. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper.
- Stalnaker, R. 2002. “Common Ground.” Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (5–6): 701–721.
- Lewis, D. 1969. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Aumann, R. J. 1976. “Agreeing to Disagree.” Annals of Statistics 4 (6): 1236–1239.
- Daft, R. L., and R. H. Lengel. 1986. “Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design.” Management Science 32 (5): 554–571.