This made me think of the way David Deutsch talks about knoweldge creation—where knowledge manifests physically in e.g. the way a species is adapted to its niche. The process of natural selection that lead to this adapation is a process of “exploratiin” and “error correction” that accumulates knoweldge. That degree of adaptation is the physical manifestation of kowledge. DNA is an important substrate of this process—however, I expect that DNA won’t be the most fruitful level of abstraction at which to think about the patient longtermist question.
Still, to explore this framework a bit more …
Re accumulation, one potential implication is that we might want to pay attention to the “error correction” mechanism that is essential to knoweldge accumulation. The scientific method is an example of this. We could try to improve the “machinery of science” that is based on this error correction logic, and we could try to apply this logic of error correction(more/better) to more areas beyond academia. Some examples here might be ways to make it easier to have constructive disagreements (eg. adverserial collaborations, the Letter community, a hypothetical wiki that is structured in a way that shows main disagreeing view poitns on a topic, …) or more experimentation/evaluation/updating mechanisms, in particualr in policy making. (Some areas, e.g. business or medicine, have figured out a bunch about how to do these sorts of things, but for reasons these insights are not necesarily being applied as widely as they could).
This made me think of the way David Deutsch talks about knoweldge creation—where knowledge manifests physically in e.g. the way a species is adapted to its niche. The process of natural selection that lead to this adapation is a process of “exploratiin” and “error correction” that accumulates knoweldge. That degree of adaptation is the physical manifestation of kowledge. DNA is an important substrate of this process—however, I expect that DNA won’t be the most fruitful level of abstraction at which to think about the patient longtermist question.
Still, to explore this framework a bit more …
Re accumulation, one potential implication is that we might want to pay attention to the “error correction” mechanism that is essential to knoweldge accumulation. The scientific method is an example of this. We could try to improve the “machinery of science” that is based on this error correction logic, and we could try to apply this logic of error correction(more/better) to more areas beyond academia. Some examples here might be ways to make it easier to have constructive disagreements (eg. adverserial collaborations, the Letter community, a hypothetical wiki that is structured in a way that shows main disagreeing view poitns on a topic, …) or more experimentation/evaluation/updating mechanisms, in particualr in policy making. (Some areas, e.g. business or medicine, have figured out a bunch about how to do these sorts of things, but for reasons these insights are not necesarily being applied as widely as they could).