Trapped Equilibria: Why Bad Institutions Don’t Reform Themselves

Bad institutions often do not stay bad because nobody understands the problem. They stay bad because the local game makes adoption of the better frame too costly.This episode presents an AI-generated audio version of Trapped Equilibria, an essay from Kunnas.com. The essay introduces concentric capture: a mechanism where epistemic, status, material, and coordination axes bind a cluster so tightly that defection along one axis produces losses across the others.The result is a trapped equilibrium. The core sincerely defends the dominant frame. The periphery may privately see the better frame but cannot safely enact it. Boundary actors, already decoupled from one or more axes, can often see and move first.The episode also connects the framework to the familiar claim that science advances “funeral by funeral.” The point is not that old scientists are merely stubborn. In some cases, the senior defender of an old paradigm is a load-bearing node across evidence standards, careers, funding expectations, and coordination norms. The funeral advances science because it breaks a bracing node, not because corpses update better than professors.Original essay: kunnas.com/articles/trapped-equilibria