One of the things you’re pointing at here is the local planning and long-term goal setting that allows you to be robust to local changes in your plans. You then go on to point at this sort of robustness picture where you’re essentially asking about how we deal with moral uncertainty and second order consequences of our actions in a highly changeable world.
I think this actually points at a specific modelling picture for what you’re thinking about.
I like to think about institutions and similar as generators and changes of a sort of continous coordination landscape. They’re essentially the things that set the local incentive landscape or in my head they’re ways of changing the contour lines of an underlying phase space that things move in.
When you’re asking if we can create institutions or good governance escape velocity you’re essentially asking whether you can create a spiral that is strong enough to external perturbation that it keeps spiralling towards good equilibria states.
There is in some sense a sort of external platonic space of cooperative mechanisms where different paths of the world lead you down different cooperative spirals. Totalitarianism is one way where you have these recursive actions that you lead down more and more towards negative states whilst something like open instituions and democracy might do something differently. The question that seems the most important for a good future imo is then how we can retain the institutions that make us robust to adversarial changes. E.g, how do we retain and improve the instituions of democracy and truth-seeking?
Another point in favor of the virtue ethics goodness spiral is that good liberal democracy improves your collective epistemics and makes it easier to steer away from bad states in the future.
Also, high plasticity moments have a very natural analogy in the phase space diagram. They’re essentially points in the plane where it is a lot easier to perturb the landscape and shift it on to a new path.
There’s a lot of interesting points here, nicely put!
I like this a lot!
One of the things you’re pointing at here is the local planning and long-term goal setting that allows you to be robust to local changes in your plans. You then go on to point at this sort of robustness picture where you’re essentially asking about how we deal with moral uncertainty and second order consequences of our actions in a highly changeable world.
I think this actually points at a specific modelling picture for what you’re thinking about.
I like to think about institutions and similar as generators and changes of a sort of continous coordination landscape. They’re essentially the things that set the local incentive landscape or in my head they’re ways of changing the contour lines of an underlying phase space that things move in.
When you’re asking if we can create institutions or good governance escape velocity you’re essentially asking whether you can create a spiral that is strong enough to external perturbation that it keeps spiralling towards good equilibria states.
There is in some sense a sort of external platonic space of cooperative mechanisms where different paths of the world lead you down different cooperative spirals. Totalitarianism is one way where you have these recursive actions that you lead down more and more towards negative states whilst something like open instituions and democracy might do something differently. The question that seems the most important for a good future imo is then how we can retain the institutions that make us robust to adversarial changes. E.g, how do we retain and improve the instituions of democracy and truth-seeking?
Another point in favor of the virtue ethics goodness spiral is that good liberal democracy improves your collective epistemics and makes it easier to steer away from bad states in the future.
Also, high plasticity moments have a very natural analogy in the phase space diagram. They’re essentially points in the plane where it is a lot easier to perturb the landscape and shift it on to a new path.
There’s a lot of interesting points here, nicely put!