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Merge pull request #975 from florihas/patch-1
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fixed a typo in 4-2-association-and-⿻-publics.md
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GlenWeyl authored Aug 12, 2024
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Expand Up @@ -41,7 +41,7 @@ Therefore, in this chapter, we will outline a theory of the informational requir

### Associations

How do people people form "an organization of persons sharing a common interest"? Clearly, a group of people who simply happen to share an interest is insufficient. People can share an interest but have no awareness of each other, or might know each other and have no idea about their shared interest. As social scientists and game theorists have recently emphasized, the collective action implied by "organization" requires a stronger notion of what it is to have an "interest", "belief" or "goal" in common. In the technical terms of these fields, the required state is what they call (approximate) "[common knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic))".
How do people form "an organization of persons sharing a common interest"? Clearly, a group of people who simply happen to share an interest is insufficient. People can share an interest but have no awareness of each other, or might know each other and have no idea about their shared interest. As social scientists and game theorists have recently emphasized, the collective action implied by "organization" requires a stronger notion of what it is to have an "interest", "belief" or "goal" in common. In the technical terms of these fields, the required state is what they call (approximate) "[common knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic))".

To motivate what this means to a game theorist, it may be helpful to consider why simply sharing a belief is insufficient to allow effective common action. Consider a group of people who all happen to speak a common second language, but none are aware that the others do. Given they all speak different first languages, they won't initially be able to communicate easily. Just knowing the language will not do them much good. Instead, what they must learn is that the *others* also know the language. That is, they must have not just basic knowledge but the "higher-order" knowledge that others know something.[^Contextcomm]

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