Live and dead players, and critical mass

This is yet another blogpost that started its life as a tweet.

There is this concept of “live player” and “dead player”. A live player is one whose strategies evolve with time, and with the environment. A dead player is one whose strategies are fixed in time, for whatever reason. When the environment changes, a dead player’s strategies stop working, and in case it’s a finite game, they are likely to lose.

This except from a blogpost, which itself seems to be an excerpt from a book, is pertinent:

A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things.

[…] On the other hand, if you fail to figure out that a player has died, you might not realize that you can get away with replacing them. Defensively, paying attention to live players allows you to anticipate and prevent the grabbing of power, for instance.

The distinction between live and dead players also matters if you are trying to predict the future of society. You can predict what will happen in a society if you understand its landscape of live players. Societies with few live players will stagnate; societies with many live players will develop and adapt

Taking the example in my tweet above, Islam in 10th century Arabia (including modern day Iraq) was a “live player”, while the version that had been exported all the way to Al Andalus (Islamic Spain) was a “dead player”, failing to evolve with the times (it’s another story that the constituency that wants to see Islam as a dead player is more politically powerful worldwide nowadays).

My tweet has generated a few replies with examples of small societies that end up being dead players while their larger counterparts continue to be “live”. I spoke about Tamil Brahmins from Bombay. There is the case of Sikhs in the UK or Canada who are far more radical (and religious) than Indian Sikhs. Italian Americans, or Hindu Americans, are other examples. Goldman Sachs in New York had lots of American Jews who wore yarmulkes.

When a subset of a community migrates to another region, their sense of community is fixed at that point in time. For Hindus in the US, for example, their view of Hinduism was what was practiced in India (or wherever) at the time they migrated.

Size does matter

The point of this blogpost is that the size of a community matters in terms of the community’s culture being “live”. The basic idea is that fundamentally, most people are conservative, and loathe to change. And for any change to percolate through a community, there needs to be a critical mass of early adopters who adopt the change, after which it becomes widespread.

And the smaller a community is, the less likely that a rare innovative individual in the community will be able to find other similarly innovative individuals in the community. Without discussion, ideas cannot develop. If ideas cannot develop, they cannot be made more popular.

When you have a critical mass of experimenters, that makes the experiments more visible. One person wearing shorts to the temple might be seen as a freak. If every week, you see a dozen people wearing shorts to (a much larger) temple, that becomes more normal, and there is a greater chance that you might want to try that as well.

The other issue with smaller communities is that they are far more conscious of their roots compared to people who are living close to where their roots are. For the latter, the roots matter, but is more of a matter of fact than a strongly defining factor. And so when some innovation comes up that they can experiment with, they have lesser baggage to let go of in order to experiment.

Yet another issue is that when you are in a small community, you can see innovations that are outside of your community as “not part of our culture”. Take the example of wearing shorts to work - you might see enough people around you do that, but if none of them are from your community, you simply reason that “this is not our culture”, and since your cultural background is so important to your identity, not aping this “foreign” culture is the dominant response.

Live and dead cultures

And so when a community is small, or lacks critical mass of people who are freak enough to innovate or experiment, there is the danger that the community as a whole might end up being a “dead player”. Any move away from what it used to be is seen as some kind of a freak event, and never gets aped. And so the culture stagnates.

Back home, even if the proportion of people willing to innovate is about the same, that there is a greater chance of innovators talking to each other means innovation is more likely to happen. And the community is more likely to be a “live player”.

Exceptions exist

Of course, things can work to the other extreme as well. There might be small communities where, out of sheer randomness, there is a high concentration of innovators. These cultures can evolve really rapidly, and even more rapidly than their larger counterparts “back home”.

It is just that the chances of this kind of thing happening are really really low. In the vast majority of cases, the small community is likely to be “deader” than the larger community back home.