I think a naïve scale-free theory of intelligent agency is basically guaranteed to be incomplete for predicting things we care about.
My guess is that you can solve for some kind of equilibrium under selection and computational costs, and that will tell you:
The timescale of planning that an agent does will be proportional to the turnover time of selection (e.g. companies can make ~10 year investments if no company could drive them to bankruptcy in ~10 years)
The space scale of cooperation will be proportional to the space scale of selection (e.g. ants in a colony are selected together, so cooperate, mostly)
This doesn’t tell you how humans can work together in groups of millions to build a country which defeats other countries and starts a space program to colonize the moon. For that, you need a notion of inductive bias at a given scale: once you get a certain level of intelligence, you generalize your values “all the way” to some level of universality.
I think a naïve scale-free theory of intelligent agency is basically guaranteed to be incomplete for predicting things we care about.
My guess is that you can solve for some kind of equilibrium under selection and computational costs, and that will tell you:
The timescale of planning that an agent does will be proportional to the turnover time of selection (e.g. companies can make ~10 year investments if no company could drive them to bankruptcy in ~10 years)
The space scale of cooperation will be proportional to the space scale of selection (e.g. ants in a colony are selected together, so cooperate, mostly)
This doesn’t tell you how humans can work together in groups of millions to build a country which defeats other countries and starts a space program to colonize the moon. For that, you need a notion of inductive bias at a given scale: once you get a certain level of intelligence, you generalize your values “all the way” to some level of universality.