In terms of high trust societies, I think its best to build any system of incentives/disincentives on the assumption that every single person in your society is a ruthless backstabbing psychopath
The issue is that this precludes pretty much everything we like. All great science has come from individuals who will work for the sake of building something great rather than working in search of a future reward. No matter how good your system of incentives[1] is, a society of ruthlessly selfish people will optimize for researchers who flatter their bosses, scapegoat their subordinates, and accomplish nothing of significance while devoting their energy to claiming that a breakthrough is just around the corner.
Evolution and random chance have gifted us with people that don’t behave that way—the only way to keep them is to make sure they don’t have to fend off selfish competitors at scale. You can’t outsmart Moloch; he’s a law of mathematics rather than a person. Your only way to win is to get lucky once (we’ve already done that part, but the window to capitalize is closing!) and then kick him when he’s down.
(barring an intelligent incentive system that can identify good science versus bad science better than a human, which would make human scientists obsolete anyhow)
The reason that “individuals who will work for the sake of building something” are able to do so is that we have built a system of incentives/disincentives that make murdering them and taking their stuff a non-optimal move. Even though that system isn’t perfect and we still get murderers and robbers and other defectors, it works well enough that those people can afford to build for the sake of building instead of spending that time/energy/capital in the most optimal way.
It is possible to get to the baseline of “no murdering” through a good legal system. It is not possible to use incentives and laws to get a low-trust population to the point of building the Apollo 11 program. Murder is (relatively) easy to identify and motivate externally, but the kind of work that leads to great scientific achievements is not.
I think the counterargument is that there are plenty of countries with something like the U.S. constitution, and their societies are often extremely different. Liberia is a key example, in that it was established by America and given a carbon copy of the Constitution, but turned out much more similar to its neighbors than to the U.S..
Singapore is a similar-but-different story. They were vastly more authoritarian than most first world governments, and succeeded in nearly eradicating crime that way, but even their society, while wealthy, is very different from, say, Japan’s, or Norway’s.
Law is downstream from the inclinations of the governed—not the other way around.
I don’t think this is very far apart from the ‘necessary but not sufficient’ argument I was making.
Also what you’re pointing out, which is that different populations/environments/cultures require different incentives and laws to get the population selection outcomes, is just an argument that Themis needs to be fine tuned based on the situation at hand. Not that it can’t function as a selection pressure at all.
The issue is that this precludes pretty much everything we like. All great science has come from individuals who will work for the sake of building something great rather than working in search of a future reward. No matter how good your system of incentives[1] is, a society of ruthlessly selfish people will optimize for researchers who flatter their bosses, scapegoat their subordinates, and accomplish nothing of significance while devoting their energy to claiming that a breakthrough is just around the corner.
Evolution and random chance have gifted us with people that don’t behave that way—the only way to keep them is to make sure they don’t have to fend off selfish competitors at scale. You can’t outsmart Moloch; he’s a law of mathematics rather than a person. Your only way to win is to get lucky once (we’ve already done that part, but the window to capitalize is closing!) and then kick him when he’s down.
(barring an intelligent incentive system that can identify good science versus bad science better than a human, which would make human scientists obsolete anyhow)
The reason that “individuals who will work for the sake of building something” are able to do so is that we have built a system of incentives/disincentives that make murdering them and taking their stuff a non-optimal move. Even though that system isn’t perfect and we still get murderers and robbers and other defectors, it works well enough that those people can afford to build for the sake of building instead of spending that time/energy/capital in the most optimal way.
It is possible to get to the baseline of “no murdering” through a good legal system. It is not possible to use incentives and laws to get a low-trust population to the point of building the Apollo 11 program. Murder is (relatively) easy to identify and motivate externally, but the kind of work that leads to great scientific achievements is not.
I think this is the crux of our disagreement.
My mental model of the world is that incentives and laws is basically how every single population that got to something like Apollo 11 got there.
Or at the very least it’s necessary if not sufficient.
I think the counterargument is that there are plenty of countries with something like the U.S. constitution, and their societies are often extremely different. Liberia is a key example, in that it was established by America and given a carbon copy of the Constitution, but turned out much more similar to its neighbors than to the U.S..
Singapore is a similar-but-different story. They were vastly more authoritarian than most first world governments, and succeeded in nearly eradicating crime that way, but even their society, while wealthy, is very different from, say, Japan’s, or Norway’s.
Law is downstream from the inclinations of the governed—not the other way around.
I don’t think this is very far apart from the ‘necessary but not sufficient’ argument I was making.
Also what you’re pointing out, which is that different populations/environments/cultures require different incentives and laws to get the population selection outcomes, is just an argument that Themis needs to be fine tuned based on the situation at hand. Not that it can’t function as a selection pressure at all.