Was this what you were alluding to in your conversation with Divya Siddharth on the podcast or where you pointing at something deeper when you thought of morality as optimal solution to collective intelligence problems?
In the book energy and civilization Vaclav Smil shows the process of civlization and complexity of rule as one that is dependent on the energy capacity of the system. It feels reasonable to me that one could also see an arising of more complex schelling points as something that arises with the increased energy and therefore information processing bandwidth that would be avaliable at any point in time. We can see something like science as a more complex schelling point that comes from more avaliable information processing. This might give a pretty nice argument for why economic well-being could lead to a general increase in moral circle expansion as well? (altough it might not be the main causal factor)
Finally I would be curious what you think about simulations in this context? If you had a reasonable agent sample couldn’t you just provide an example by doing an MCMC simulation of the agent dynamics and point at that as a way of seeing general selective norms or do you think that game theory or MAS is too simplistic yet to describe such a system well?
Was this what you were alluding to in your conversation with Divya Siddharth on the podcast or where you pointing at something deeper when you thought of morality as optimal solution to collective intelligence problems?
Yes, I consider this post to be a better/clearer elaboration of the idea than I was able to squeeze into the podcast format.
If you had a reasonable agent sample couldn’t you just provide an example by doing an MCMC simulation of the agent dynamics and point at that as a way of seeing general selective norms
Yes in principle, though I think in the end we’ll find that simulation is inefficient relative to reading and writing proofs or arguments. To make an analogy, consider this program:
n=0
while n<1000:
n+=3
print(n)
What does it print? Don’t make an off-by-one error :)
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
The answer is 1002, and you probably never thought of the number 501 at all while answering, which means you didn’t simulate the program; you reasoned about it.
I suspect the most prevalent Schelling norms — both cosmically and terrestrially — are norms that can be arrived at through reasoning as such, without running unnecessarily lengthy simulations.
Was this what you were alluding to in your conversation with Divya Siddharth on the podcast or where you pointing at something deeper when you thought of morality as optimal solution to collective intelligence problems?
In the book energy and civilization Vaclav Smil shows the process of civlization and complexity of rule as one that is dependent on the energy capacity of the system. It feels reasonable to me that one could also see an arising of more complex schelling points as something that arises with the increased energy and therefore information processing bandwidth that would be avaliable at any point in time. We can see something like science as a more complex schelling point that comes from more avaliable information processing. This might give a pretty nice argument for why economic well-being could lead to a general increase in moral circle expansion as well? (altough it might not be the main causal factor)
Finally I would be curious what you think about simulations in this context? If you had a reasonable agent sample couldn’t you just provide an example by doing an MCMC simulation of the agent dynamics and point at that as a way of seeing general selective norms or do you think that game theory or MAS is too simplistic yet to describe such a system well?
Yes, I consider this post to be a better/clearer elaboration of the idea than I was able to squeeze into the podcast format.
Yes in principle, though I think in the end we’ll find that simulation is inefficient relative to reading and writing proofs or arguments. To make an analogy, consider this program:
What does it print? Don’t make an off-by-one error :)
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
The answer is 1002, and you probably never thought of the number 501 at all while answering, which means you didn’t simulate the program; you reasoned about it.
I suspect the most prevalent Schelling norms — both cosmically and terrestrially — are norms that can be arrived at through reasoning as such, without running unnecessarily lengthy simulations.