#collective-action

#collective-action

Of the original nine colleges and universities, so far none has signed, and seven- Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Universities of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Southern California and Virginia -have loudly and forcefully rejected it, citing "our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone" (MIT) and "the government's lack of authority to dictate our curriculum or the content of academic speech" (Brown).

In Hans Christian Andersen's folktale, The Emperor's New Clothes, when a child cries out that the emperor is naked, he isn't revealing a secret. Everyone already knows it. What changes in that instant is that everyone now knows that everyone else knows. That shift-from mutual knowledge to common knowledge, from private recognition to public awareness-topples the illusion. It's also the central insight of cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy, and Outrage.

And so rather than talk about who those actors are that hold them at risk or talk about coalitions of one form or another that might take on coalitions of malign actors, let's talk about the needs of our citizens and that everyone wants to live in a crime-free world. That might sound like a bit of a panacea, but there's no one that would argue against that.

It's not just me, of course. Other people are exhausted by different things in different ways, and many people are exhausted (or worse) by more material changes in their lives.