The unilateralist’s curse prolongs meetings

In the nature of things, individuals usually have less influence over events than larger groups. However, there are some cases where that’s not true—where individuals unilaterally can take a course of action, and where the effect is just the same as if a whole group had taken it. A salient example is the dissemination of dangerous knowledge. Suppose that a group of scientists have discovered how to create a dangerous virus, and there is the question of whether to publish the results. In this case, an individual scientist publishing the results unilaterally leads to precisely the same outcome as the group making a collective decision.

Nick Bostrom, Tom Douglas, and Anders Sandberg call this type of situation “the unilateralist’s curse”, and discuss a range of cases where it applies, such as geoengineering and the spread of genetically modified organisms. In many of these cases, individual players acting unilaterally plausibly leads to harmful outcomes (though that need not always be the case). That doesn’t mean, however, that individual players acting unilaterally always have selfish or nefarious preferences. On the contrary, they can be perfectly altruistically motivated. Idiosyncratic beliefs about outcomes can be sufficient for unilateral action. This makes the unilateralist’s curse particularly tricky to avoid.

Though Bostrom et al. primarily (but not exclusively) discuss cases related to catastrophic risks, the unilateralist’s curse is ubiquitous in all sorts of domains. An example I’m interested in is meetings.

Consider a meeting, seminar, or post-talk Q&A with, say, somewhere between five and thirty participants. There’s a chairperson leading the discussion, but people are free to ask questions or give comments on different topics; and if they do, others (e.g. the speaker, if it’s a talk) will typically respond. In such situations, the conditions for the unilateralist’s curse are satisfied: individuals can decide whether to initiate discussion on a topic unilaterally, and if they do, the outcome is much the same as if the decision had been made by a larger group. Very often, this structure results in discussions on topics not worth discussing—and, consequently, in overly long meetings. This is especially so in larger groups (as Bostrom et al. show, the unilateralist’s curse gets worse as the number of players that can act unilaterally grows).

The standard explanation for why meetings tend to become too long is of course misaligned preferences: that people “love the sound of their own voice”, or that they want to signal competence and dominance through talking a lot, etc. No doubt that’s often a central component. However, I also think that idiosyncratic beliefs play a role. People are often confused about what’s more and less relevant. Hence, if someone brings up a peripheral point, the explanation may well be that they genuinely (if erroneously) believe it’s important.

To lift the curse in the context of meetings, the chairperson could cut less interesting questions and comments short. Another solution is for individuals to adjust for the unilateralist’s curse and the possibility that their beliefs about a topic’s importance is idiosyncratic, and thus raise the threshold for discussing it. (This is what Bostrom et al. call the meta-rationality model.) However, one problem is that we have meetings partly because people have “private signals”—knowledge and perspectives that aren’t widely known—that we want them to share. You might risk throwing out the baby (surprising but genuinely illuminating points) with the bathwater (prolonged discussions about peripheral issues).

That said, I think that that’s normally not the direction we err in. Telling people their points are irrelevant is awkward, so chairpersons tend to intervene less than what’s optimal from an epistemic point of view (i.e. disregarding social/pragmatic concerns). And for a variety of reasons (including the curse of knowledge/naive realism, as well as failure to grasp the logic of the unilateralist’s curse) people don’t adopt the meta-rationality model (at least not fully). Therefore, I think meetings do suffer from the unilateralist’s curse; and I think it’s one reason they’re often too long.