One possibility I like for addressing issues of collective alignment is to consider ways to establish equilibria where we can see gains from trade through compromise.
“Our social intuitions about fairness and democracy posit that everyone deserves an equal say in the final outcome. Unfortunately for these intuitions, compromise bargains are necessarily weighted by power—“might makes right.”″
It seems that people could decide to make a meta-compromise and not try to get things weighted via power, understanding that power is often distributed via luck and that they or their beliefs might be in the position of not having power in the future. They could decide to weight via people and only compromise with people that weight via people, to improve the long term likelihood that some of their values persist over time.
This seems to be what democracy does for you or is supposed to do for you, when it works.
Even if democracy is not the best possible system for compromise, it seems important to work within it to maintain the norm of “respecting the current compromise system”. Normalising the subvertion or ignoring of our current compromise system seems like a very bad norm to create for a peaceful or pleasant future.
Also I don’t think power is a scalar, or a hard thing. It is a convenient fiction we all chose to believe in, that can go up in smoke in an instant.
One possibility I like for addressing issues of collective alignment is to consider ways to establish equilibria where we can see gains from trade through compromise.
He seems pretty down on democracy.
“Our social intuitions about fairness and democracy posit that everyone deserves an equal say in the final outcome. Unfortunately for these intuitions, compromise bargains are necessarily weighted by power—“might makes right.”″
It seems that people could decide to make a meta-compromise and not try to get things weighted via power, understanding that power is often distributed via luck and that they or their beliefs might be in the position of not having power in the future. They could decide to weight via people and only compromise with people that weight via people, to improve the long term likelihood that some of their values persist over time.
This seems to be what democracy does for you or is supposed to do for you, when it works.
Even if democracy is not the best possible system for compromise, it seems important to work within it to maintain the norm of “respecting the current compromise system”. Normalising the subvertion or ignoring of our current compromise system seems like a very bad norm to create for a peaceful or pleasant future.
Also I don’t think power is a scalar, or a hard thing. It is a convenient fiction we all chose to believe in, that can go up in smoke in an instant.