The list of things seems basically right to me, although I find it a bit jarring to put evolution under “groups” and I might want it to be in its own category or something. When analyzing groups and their agency it seems important to me to be very careful about what the group is actually optimizing for.
What is the group actually optimizing for? Not having an explicit optimization goal is kind of the point here, and it is the common theme between human groups and evolution: lots of agents optimize for something, and something very different happens as a result.
I just mean that it’s easy to judge a group as being bad at doing stuff if you judge it to be optimizing poorly for a thing that it’s not actually optimizing for. Nobody does the thing they are supposedly doing and so forth. There’s a separate question of whether a group is doing a good job optimizing for what its founder(s) wanted it to optimize for.
The list of things seems basically right to me, although I find it a bit jarring to put evolution under “groups” and I might want it to be in its own category or something. When analyzing groups and their agency it seems important to me to be very careful about what the group is actually optimizing for.
What is the group actually optimizing for? Not having an explicit optimization goal is kind of the point here, and it is the common theme between human groups and evolution: lots of agents optimize for something, and something very different happens as a result.
I just mean that it’s easy to judge a group as being bad at doing stuff if you judge it to be optimizing poorly for a thing that it’s not actually optimizing for. Nobody does the thing they are supposedly doing and so forth. There’s a separate question of whether a group is doing a good job optimizing for what its founder(s) wanted it to optimize for.