79 chunks · 58 episodes
Why are so many words based in Latin? Because it is a schelling point. For a word to emerge and settle in common usage, everyone who hears it has to agree that it sounds legitimate. No one has to love it, but nearly eve...
...een using those spots. Typically spontaneous coordination requires some kind of schelling point. For humans that can be hard because everyone thinks differently. But agents running from the same model are direct clones of one another. The top an...
...s, it's also not particularly appropriate for a wedding! "Come On, Eileen" is a schelling point; a song that everybody knows everybody likes at weddings.
A cynical move: the aggregator API rug pull. Make an API to become the obvious schelling point… and then remove it. Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter all did this. How it works: there's a growing 1P platform that then opens up an API so 3Ps can bui...
...-user tools. In enterprise, higher leverage tools can emerge, because there's a schelling point of the tools that the enterprise requires the employees to use. But for consumers, it's hopeless to coordinate on anything other than the lowest comm...
...l monopoly; everyone above us should be a commodity." Still, it helped create a schelling point that made it very unlikely that powerful open weight models are banned. We are stumbling towards the goldilocks path of powerful models that are comm...
...ation to happen, and expectations to change. The possibility was there, but the schelling point wasn't.
Coordination cost needs to be paid if there isn't a schelling point. Coordination costs are huge. Schelling points make it go from large to ~zero. All it takes is a point everyone can agree is good enough. What counts...
...to worry about the incentives of Obsidian's creators. That makes it an emergent schelling point for an ecosystem. No one finds Obsidian's control to be a deal-breaker, because it structurally does not have any. Arguably it would have even less i...
Schelling points have to be sharp. Diffuse things don't have schelling points. People who are already convinced can find a diffuse thing compelling; but people who a...
Meaningful state tends to accumulate around schelling points in an ecosystem. In the same origin paradigm, if that schelling point is one origin's turf, they then accumulate the power. They can hold that data ...
For a schelling point to stay coherent in an ecosystem, everyone has to agree it's reasonable relative to the value of the ecosystem. At the beginning, everyone thinking i...
...the use, and use that instead. This allows the community to emergently discover schelling points. But that doesn't work in private contexts. If I create a new label in Gmail, I can't draw on the wisdom of the crowd on what a good ontology is. Im...
Sometimes refactoring something into a schelling point creates unforeseeable value. For example, maybe you have a number of bits of functionality spread out across some scripts. Then you refactor it into ...
...to be a bit better than alternatives and also has a fundamental bonus becomes a schelling point Even if it's only a little bit better, if it has a fundamental bonus (e.g. open, values-aligned) then everyone picks it and it starts developing obvi...
...target and why. Which of these things help achieve that goal?" A milestone is a schelling point created by a leader to cut through coordination cost. A milestone is an assertion that "this collection of projects add up to more than the sum of th...
...ealism didn't die, it just got scattered. The Resonant Computing Manifesto is a Schelling point for people who never stopped believing. The manifesto isn't proposing something new—it's trying to recover what got lost. This is a homecoming, not a...
...at the oracle would tell you the answer. It was really just a way to discover a schelling point that isn't best but just one everyone can agree on to solve the tie. Related to my old Schelling Points in Organizations..
...nomy is an emergent process of accumulation. An emergent process of discovering schelling points. Similar looking results, but wildly different resilience and adaptability.
...he transaction price is where these different models find their overlap. Like a Schelling point in game theory. Not that everyone agrees on "true value," but they converge on a price that allows exchange. Private/early stage: wide variance, high...