Con-C.3.2 — Hayek’s Knowledge Problem: Centralized Coordination Cannot Access Local Knowledge

Severity: C (Serious) | Sphere: Se3 | Target: ResearchCity

Hayek (1945) argued that the most important knowledge for economic coordination is local — dispersed across millions of individuals, tacit, context-dependent, and impossible to aggregate at a central point. Prices in a market economy serve as distributed signals that transmit this local knowledge without requiring any central aggregator.

ResearchCity proposes to be that central aggregator — for all existential risks, across all domains, for all 8 billion people. But the knowledge needed to solve nuclear risk is held by classified military strategists; the knowledge for AI alignment is held by competing labs (DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic) that will not share insights; the knowledge for climate adaptation is distributed across local communities; the knowledge for Jubilee design is precisely the dispersed, preference-laden knowledge that Hayek argued cannot be centralized.

Ostrom (1990, 2010) demonstrated that commons problems are best solved by polycentric governance — multiple overlapping institutions at different scales, each with local knowledge and authority. This is the structural opposite of ResearchCity. The problems ResearchCity targets are not primarily research problems (where concentrated expertise helps) but coordination problems (where distributed knowledge is essential).

Connection to prior rounds: C3.2 extends Con-C.2.6 from the individual to the institutional level. Where C2.6 focused on the voluntariness paradox (wealthy actors defecting), C3.2 addresses the information problem: even willing participants cannot provide the local knowledge a centralized institution would need.

(Source: C3.2 from OOv1 Critique Round 3.)