The thing that makes a U.S. court ruling work is not that the court is high status. It is that the United States Government is a pretty coherent entity (look, stop laughing for a minute, I’m about to explain) such that if Manhattan court decides that Bob should be locked up for assault, or that Carla and Dean are married, or that Ella isn’t allowed to drive a car for a year, then Albany and Buffalo courts will back that decision up and police departments all over the state will enforce that. Different U.S. courts disagree with each other sometimes, but they have a pretty established way of communicating and resolving that disagreement such that the police department knows whether they’re putting someone in jail or not. Related, the other thing that makes the court work is that there’s a police department; whether the police department finds the court “high status” or not is sort of the wrong question, the relevant question is if the judge says “put Bob in jail” then the overwhelming majority of the police will help put Bob in jail or at least not let him out.
Status isn’t the metric here. Like, it’s not obvious to me that Habryka is the highest status rationalist who works at Lightcone (Raemon has more lw karma and is the charismatic dude in solstice videos!) but Raemon can’t fire Habryka, Habryka can fire Raemon.
Should a rationalist court declare someone guilty of something, (1) half of the rationalists will openly disrespect the court, just to signal how contrarian they are; and (2) that person will sue the court for libel at an actual court.
But yes, this is basically how I expect things to go. I’ll maybe say only twenty percent of the rationalists would ignore the court, maybe going down to 5% depending on how thoroughly the court did its homework and was able to publicly argue its case.
I think the rationalist community is too big and vague for this to work, but I think things in this shape can work for more clearly defined organizations that exist partially within the rationalist community. Lightcone is a defined org, it can fire people, if needed the board could fire Habryka. Likewise Guild of the Rose, Mox, CFAR, many organizations can and do make internal judgements with varying degrees of structure and skill.
A missing ingredient is scope (many of them would wisely say ‘not my circus’ to events that happen outside their subdomain) and incentives to share their results.
The thing that makes a U.S. court ruling work is not that the court is high status. It is that the United States Government is a pretty coherent entity (look, stop laughing for a minute, I’m about to explain) such that if Manhattan court decides that Bob should be locked up for assault, or that Carla and Dean are married, or that Ella isn’t allowed to drive a car for a year, then Albany and Buffalo courts will back that decision up and police departments all over the state will enforce that. Different U.S. courts disagree with each other sometimes, but they have a pretty established way of communicating and resolving that disagreement such that the police department knows whether they’re putting someone in jail or not. Related, the other thing that makes the court work is that there’s a police department; whether the police department finds the court “high status” or not is sort of the wrong question, the relevant question is if the judge says “put Bob in jail” then the overwhelming majority of the police will help put Bob in jail or at least not let him out.
Status isn’t the metric here. Like, it’s not obvious to me that Habryka is the highest status rationalist who works at Lightcone (Raemon has more lw karma and is the charismatic dude in solstice videos!) but Raemon can’t fire Habryka, Habryka can fire Raemon.
But yes, this is basically how I expect things to go. I’ll maybe say only twenty percent of the rationalists would ignore the court, maybe going down to 5% depending on how thoroughly the court did its homework and was able to publicly argue its case.
I think the rationalist community is too big and vague for this to work, but I think things in this shape can work for more clearly defined organizations that exist partially within the rationalist community. Lightcone is a defined org, it can fire people, if needed the board could fire Habryka. Likewise Guild of the Rose, Mox, CFAR, many organizations can and do make internal judgements with varying degrees of structure and skill.
A missing ingredient is scope (many of them would wisely say ‘not my circus’ to events that happen outside their subdomain) and incentives to share their results.