Common knowledge fuels coordination

Updated: 2025.12.03 3D ago 5 sources
Once non‑elite beliefs become visible to everyone online, they turn into 'common knowledge' that lowers the cost of organizing around them. That helps movements—wise or unwise—form faster because each participant knows others see the same thing and knows others know that they see it. — It reframes online mobilization as a coordination problem where visibility, not persuasion, drives political power.

Sources

How To Understand Human Behavior (Part 3/4)
Josh Zlatkus 2025.12.03 57% relevant
The essay explains how situations recruit universal human architecture to produce coordinated outcomes; that links to the existing idea that visibility and shared beliefs convert private preferences into public coordination — here the article supplies the microfoundational account (situation + person) that makes common‑knowledge effects predictable.
How to Actually Combat Economic Inequality
Molly Glick 2025.12.02 90% relevant
The Nautilus article documents how making richer people more visible in an individual's local sample increases support for redistribution and escalation risk; that is a specific instance of the existing idea that making beliefs or conditions visible turns them into coordination‑enabling common knowledge and changes collective action.
Your followers might hate you
Paul Bloom 2025.12.01 70% relevant
The essay’s description of reputational consensus forming in a small scholarly community (people talking offline and reaching a shared negative view of a professor) maps to the 'common knowledge' concept: visibility of attitudes (not just public metrics) enables coordination of social responses that platform counts may miss or distort.
coloring outside the lines of color revolutions
el gato malo 2025.11.30 78% relevant
The article emphasizes visibility and layered mirroring (social proof, repeated lies, A/B testing) that turn beliefs into common knowledge and thereby enable coordinated political or social action—the same mechanism the existing idea identifies as key to online mobilization.
Some Political Psychology Links, 10/9/2025
Arnold Kling 2025.10.09 100% relevant
Kling cites Steven Pinker’s common‑knowledge logic to explain why unsober beliefs coalesce into movements when surfaced by social media.
← Back to All Ideas