Title: Book Review: Cailin O'Connor's <em>The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution</em>
Date: 2020-01-20 22:20
Category: commentary
-Tags: categorization, feminism, game theory, review (book)
+Tags: categorization, convention, feminism, game theory, review (book)
[This is a _super-great book_](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-unfairness-9780198789970) about the cultural evolutionary game theory of gender roles! (And also stuff like race and religion and caste, I guess, but I'm ignoring that because I haven't gotten around to broadening the topic scope of this blog yet.) I am _unreasonably excited about this book_ for supplying the glue of _analytical rigor_ to a part of my world-model that had previously been held together by threads of mere handwaving! (Three years ago on this blog, I wrote, ["social-role defaults are inevitably going to accrete around [sex differences]"](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/#views-have-changed), but I didn't, and couldn't, have told you _how and why_ in a form suitable for verification by computer simulation.)
Of course, "women and men dancing" is just an illustrative example as far as the _theory_ is concerned: the "types" here are just opaque tags that separate otherwise-identical abstract agents into groups. In particular, types are _not_ strategies. In terms of the dancing game, the _strategies_ "lead" and "follow" can't be types: rather, the arbitrary "men" and "women" tags (which might as well be [suggestively-named Lisp tokens](https://www.readthesequences.com/Truly-Part-Of-You)) are a symmetry-breaking hack that lets us turn _many_ complementary coordination games (for _every pair_, who should lead?) into a _single_ correlative coordination game (for the whole population, are we using the "men lead" or the "women lead" convention?).
-Nor does there need to be a central "dance caller" who specifies which convention the population should follow. If strategies that are more successful are more frequently _imitated_ via social learning, conventions can arise from a process of cultural evolution: in a world where most men happen to lead, women learn to follow in order to have a successful dance, and the population gets swept in to the "men lead" convention. A convention's [basin of attraction](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Basin_of_attraction) is the set of initial population conditions that lead to the evolution of that convention. When there are many possible equilibrium with roughly-equal-sized basins of attraction, the outcome is highly "conventional": things could have easily been otherwise given different initial conditions. (And can even be said to _contain more information_: "more possible outcomes" and "equally-probable outcomes" are what maximize [entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)).) Situations with fewer, unequally-sized basins of attraction are more "functional": the outcome is mostly determined by the game itself.
+Nor does there need to be a central "dance caller" who specifies which convention the population should follow. If strategies that are more successful are more frequently _imitated_ via social learning, conventions can arise from a process of cultural evolution: in a world where most men happen to lead, women learn to follow in order to have a successful dance, and the population gets swept in to the "men lead" convention. A convention's [basin of attraction](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Basin_of_attraction) is the set of initial population conditions that lead to the evolution of that convention. When there are many possible equilibria with roughly-equal-sized basins of attraction, the outcome is highly "conventional": things could have easily been otherwise given different initial conditions. (And can even be said to _contain more information_: "more possible outcomes" and "equally-probable outcomes" are what maximize [entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)).) Situations with fewer, unequally-sized basins of attraction are more "functional": the outcome is mostly determined by the game itself.
And that's where gender roles come from! In a Society facing complementary coordination problems in production, gender is _the symmetry-breaker around which conventions form_. And if skills need to be trained long before they get put into production, that shapes early socialization—in a Society where women do "women's work" to complement "men's work", they're raised to start practicing it as girls.
With types, this is no longer true: the population can settle on equilibria that favor the interests of one type over another (but are better for everyone than the absence of coordination), like an "always Bach" convention in [the Bach–Stravinsky game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_sexes_(game_theory)), or in the aggregation of [_many_ games that the type tags are being used for](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/).
-This is especially true if we drop the assumption that the type "tags" have no in-game significance (other than being visible for coordination) and introduce an asymmetric payoff matrix. Consider the Nash bargaining game: two agents have to decide how to divide a pie with 10 slices, but if their demands are incompatible (like when I demand 7 slices and you also demand 7 slices, but 7 + 7 = 14 is greater than 10), then the pie explodes, and no one gets any pie. If different types of agents have different fallback options, that affects their incentives in the bargaining game: if you wouldn't have anything to eat if you didn't get any pie, then you might want to make a conservative demand, like 3 slices, in order to ensure that you get _some_ pie even if it turns out that I'm a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices. But if I have a sandwich that's as valuable to me as 2½ slices of pie, then I'm not particularly worried about you being a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices: to me, the difference between a successful 3-slice demand and failing to make a deal at all is only half a slice, which gives me an incentive to demand more, because I have less to lose than you if bargaining fails.
+<a id="threatpoints-and-bargaining"></a>This is especially true if we drop the assumption that the type "tags" have no in-game significance (other than being visible for coordination) and introduce an asymmetric payoff matrix. Consider the Nash bargaining game: two agents have to decide how to divide a pie with 10 slices, but if their demands are incompatible (like when I demand 7 slices and you also demand 7 slices, but 7 + 7 = 14 is greater than 10), then the pie explodes, and no one gets any pie. If different types of agents have different fallback options, that affects their incentives in the bargaining game: if you wouldn't have anything to eat if you didn't get any pie, then you might want to make a conservative demand, like 3 slices, in order to ensure that you get _some_ pie even if it turns out that I'm a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices. But if I have a sandwich that's as valuable to me as 2½ slices of pie, then I'm not particularly worried about you being a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices: to me, the difference between a successful 3-slice demand and failing to make a deal at all is only half a slice, which gives me an incentive to demand more, because I have less to lose than you if bargaining fails.
This kind of dynamic explains [the differences in women's roles between patriarchal "plow cultures" (in which men do agriculture with plows) and non-patriarchal "hoe cultures" (in which women do horticulture with hoes)](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/hoe-cultures-a-type-of-non-patriarchal-society/): a coordination equilibrium in which Society's primary means of sustenance is considered "women's work" gives women more negotiating power _as a class_. (Even when individual women in a [patriarchal](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/) Society have high privilege (_e.g._, earning power), they're still women as far as conventions are concerned.)
"Ultimately," she writes, "I will present a picture in which social justice is an endless battle. The forces of cultural evolution can pull populations towards inequity, and combating those forces requires constant vigilance." The book concludes, "The battle for social justice is against a hydra that grows a new head each time any one is cut off."
-When I imagine an intelligent arch-reactionary reading _Origins of Unfairness_ (perhaps [twiddling his mustache](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DastardlyWhiplash) during an hour of study between a 2:30 [dog-kicking appointment](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KickTheDog) and 4 o'clock [advocacy of a Trump _coup d'état_](https://blog.jim.com/politics/the-likely-shape-of-a-trump-autocoup/)), I see him nodding along thoughtfully at the lucid prose explaining the underlying game theory insights (in between cringing at the occasional Judith Butler and stereotype-threat cites). That man, in the service of callously protecting his personal power, might construe _Origins_ as "supporting" _his_ ideology.
+When I imagine an intelligent arch-reactionary reading _Origins of Unfairness_ (perhaps [twiddling his mustache](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DastardlyWhiplash) during an hour of study between a 2:30 [dog-kicking appointment](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KickTheDog) and 4 o'clock [advocacy of a Trump _coup d'état_](https://blog.jim.com/politics/the-likely-shape-of-a-trump-autocoup/)), I see him nodding along thoughtfully at the lucid prose explaining the underlying game theory insights (in between cringing at the occasional Judith Butler and stereotype-threat cites). That man, in the service of callously protecting his personal power and privilege, might construe _Origins_ as "supporting" _his_ ideology.
"Bwah-ha-ha!" he laughs maniacally. "I already knew that feminism was doomed simply due to the nature and meaning of male and female—but I had no idea it was _further_ doomed as a result of the _cultural evolutionary game theory of complementary coordination problems!_ And this, from one of the corrupt leftist establishment's own scholaresses! Priceless!"
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