I strongly agree that it’s important to split up questions like this in different ways, to be properly circumspect.
“stealing from the outgroup is good” [is the Schelling answer]
I disagree that this is the cosmic Schelling answer to “is stealing from the outgroup good?”, for basically the same reasons explained in
the section “Scale-invariant adaptations”
the paragraph “what about civilizations that endorse stealing from outgroups while prohibiting it internally?”
the section “Scale invariance revisted”
Basically: stealing between groups is just “stealing” at the next scale of organization up, where groups are members of a larger scale system that itself can survive and flourish from Pareto-positive trade or perish from internal strife.
Although, to steal-man something close your point, I suspect the cosmic Schelling answer to the question “Is it better to steal from the out-group or the in-group?” might be “the out-group”. I’m not confident in that — because I’m not sure how often it would trigger wars — but you might be able to convince me of it, for example on the grounds that in-group↔out-group interactions are less frequent than in-group↔in-group interactions.
And of course, there are human groups in which the Schelling answer is as you say.
What about “stealing from civs we’re not causally connected with is good/bad”?
I’m not sure you’ve given arguments for bad over good.
We might hope that successful civilisations have norms that generalize to this case from the causal coordination they do.
This seems more likely if there are more scales-of-coordination still to be discovered (eg if causally coordinating with alien civs will be important), and if power is more broadly distributed (vs one company taking over the world and coordination outside that company not mattering)
We might hope that successful civilisations have norms that generalize to this case from the causal coordination they do.
Yep, I think in the end we’ll settle on irreducible-computation-causation as the main notion of causation relevant to morality, and then there won’t be a special case to be made about the causal/acausal distinction.
Anyhow good points, sorry for not really engaging with the scale invariance argument—I think it’s definitely plausible. There’s some differences between scales (e.g. law enforcement being harder on larger scales) that certainly help make inter-tribe or inter-nation conflict a trickier local-equilibrium to escape than inter-personal conflict—more generally I’m unsure how much we should expect the cosmos-weighted-for-civilization-as-we’d-recognize-it to be full of civilizations that proactively move towards pareto improvements even when the environment is far away from them, versus civilizations that just sort of stumble around and try different cultural innovations until they hit ones that work just well enough.
I strongly agree that it’s important to split up questions like this in different ways, to be properly circumspect.
I disagree that this is the cosmic Schelling answer to “is stealing from the outgroup good?”, for basically the same reasons explained in
the section “Scale-invariant adaptations”
the paragraph “what about civilizations that endorse stealing from outgroups while prohibiting it internally?”
the section “Scale invariance revisted”
Basically: stealing between groups is just “stealing” at the next scale of organization up, where groups are members of a larger scale system that itself can survive and flourish from Pareto-positive trade or perish from internal strife.
Although, to steal-man something close your point, I suspect the cosmic Schelling answer to the question “Is it better to steal from the out-group or the in-group?” might be “the out-group”. I’m not confident in that — because I’m not sure how often it would trigger wars — but you might be able to convince me of it, for example on the grounds that in-group↔out-group interactions are less frequent than in-group↔in-group interactions.
And of course, there are human groups in which the Schelling answer is as you say.
What about “stealing from civs we’re not causally connected with is good/bad”?
I’m not sure you’ve given arguments for bad over good.
We might hope that successful civilisations have norms that generalize to this case from the causal coordination they do.
This seems more likely if there are more scales-of-coordination still to be discovered (eg if causally coordinating with alien civs will be important), and if power is more broadly distributed (vs one company taking over the world and coordination outside that company not mattering)
(Btw great post!!)
Yep, I think in the end we’ll settle on irreducible-computation-causation as the main notion of causation relevant to morality, and then there won’t be a special case to be made about the causal/acausal distinction.
But is there any active selection for that amongst civilizations who survive and grow?
XD
Anyhow good points, sorry for not really engaging with the scale invariance argument—I think it’s definitely plausible. There’s some differences between scales (e.g. law enforcement being harder on larger scales) that certainly help make inter-tribe or inter-nation conflict a trickier local-equilibrium to escape than inter-personal conflict—more generally I’m unsure how much we should expect the cosmos-weighted-for-civilization-as-we’d-recognize-it to be full of civilizations that proactively move towards pareto improvements even when the environment is far away from them, versus civilizations that just sort of stumble around and try different cultural innovations until they hit ones that work just well enough.