"Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!"
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Minsky’s little traffic parable is a sly defense of a truth that annoys individualists: some rules are “irrational” only if you insist on judging them at the wrong scale. For one driver alone on an empty road, left-versus-right is arbitrary theater. Add a second driver and the “arbitrary” becomes life-or-death. The point isn’t that rules are sacred; it’s that coordination is a different problem than personal preference.
As a scientist of minds and machines, Minsky is smuggling in a systems lesson: the moment you have many agents interacting, you get emergent consequences that no single agent can intuit from their own experience. The rule’s value isn’t in its intrinsic logic but in its shared adoption. That’s why he chooses traffic, a domain where the cost of noncompliance is immediate and visible. It makes the social contract feel less like moral sermonizing and more like engineering.
The subtext is quietly anti-romantic about freedom. “Makes no sense for individuals” doesn’t mean oppressive; it means the individual is not the right unit of analysis. Politics, norms, even etiquette work like protocols: dull, constraining, occasionally stupid in isolation, yet stabilizing when everyone runs the same version.
Context matters here. Minsky came out of an era enthralled by cybernetics, computation, and control theory, when society looked increasingly like a network of interacting processes. His line reads like a warning against the contemporary temptation to treat every rule as a personal insult rather than a coordination technology.
As a scientist of minds and machines, Minsky is smuggling in a systems lesson: the moment you have many agents interacting, you get emergent consequences that no single agent can intuit from their own experience. The rule’s value isn’t in its intrinsic logic but in its shared adoption. That’s why he chooses traffic, a domain where the cost of noncompliance is immediate and visible. It makes the social contract feel less like moral sermonizing and more like engineering.
The subtext is quietly anti-romantic about freedom. “Makes no sense for individuals” doesn’t mean oppressive; it means the individual is not the right unit of analysis. Politics, norms, even etiquette work like protocols: dull, constraining, occasionally stupid in isolation, yet stabilizing when everyone runs the same version.
Context matters here. Minsky came out of an era enthralled by cybernetics, computation, and control theory, when society looked increasingly like a network of interacting processes. His line reads like a warning against the contemporary temptation to treat every rule as a personal insult rather than a coordination technology.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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