If no individual wants to carry on a tradition, despite being immortal, post scarcity, and completely free to choose it.… that seems like an irrefutable proof that the tradition actually wasn’t that great after all. If nobody wants to do Japanese folk dancing, why should individuals be forced to preserve it?
Preserving a tradition requires having some critical mass of people follow it. It’s a collective action problem—following it yourself won’t suffice to preserve it.
Then you can try to convince people to join you in preserving it. If it’s really a valuable thing, it shouldn’t be that hard to do, especially with Minds to help with the grunt work of searching for interested people. Even in canon Culture, Minds often do weird little projects like this if it catches their interest.
If you could just “convince people” to go along with solving a collective action problem, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a collective action problem. The whole idea of a collective action problem is that this sort of coordination is difficult. And in this case one of the things the government can do is solve collective action problems.
The government is a clumsy and forceful way to do coordination. I don’t have a problem with a thousand people voluntarily signing a contract to do a religious commune or whatever. But forcing people to play along when they don’t want to and would leave if they could, just so you can preserve a tradition is pretty horrible. We generally call that “tyranny”.
I proposed my own coordination layer for solving the collective action problem—ask a Mind to search for people who would be interested in your thing and would voluntarily agree to do it. Convincing people is a lot easier when you’re talking to the top 1000 people most likely to be interested. Yes, sometimes you won’t find enough people to sustain your weird archaic tradition and it’ll die out. The alternative is to force them to sustain it and I consider that unacceptable.
I think the main thing I was gesturing at in the post is that traditions can die and be lost beyond recovery, and when they are gone we accept that loss the same way that we accept the deaths of people from the past.
In the same way, that it’s sad when someone dies unnecessarily today, it would be sad for certain traditions that we have today to be lost. We also close the door on evolutions of those traditions and experiences downstream from those things that lead to valuable mind states.
I am less concerned about traditions that are dropped by lack of interest in the far future because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
If no individual wants to carry on a tradition, despite being immortal, post scarcity, and completely free to choose it.… that seems like an irrefutable proof that the tradition actually wasn’t that great after all. If nobody wants to do Japanese folk dancing, why should individuals be forced to preserve it?
Preserving a tradition requires having some critical mass of people follow it. It’s a collective action problem—following it yourself won’t suffice to preserve it.
Then you can try to convince people to join you in preserving it. If it’s really a valuable thing, it shouldn’t be that hard to do, especially with Minds to help with the grunt work of searching for interested people. Even in canon Culture, Minds often do weird little projects like this if it catches their interest.
If you could just “convince people” to go along with solving a collective action problem, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a collective action problem. The whole idea of a collective action problem is that this sort of coordination is difficult. And in this case one of the things the government can do is solve collective action problems.
The government is a clumsy and forceful way to do coordination. I don’t have a problem with a thousand people voluntarily signing a contract to do a religious commune or whatever. But forcing people to play along when they don’t want to and would leave if they could, just so you can preserve a tradition is pretty horrible. We generally call that “tyranny”.
I proposed my own coordination layer for solving the collective action problem—ask a Mind to search for people who would be interested in your thing and would voluntarily agree to do it. Convincing people is a lot easier when you’re talking to the top 1000 people most likely to be interested. Yes, sometimes you won’t find enough people to sustain your weird archaic tradition and it’ll die out. The alternative is to force them to sustain it and I consider that unacceptable.
I think the main thing I was gesturing at in the post is that traditions can die and be lost beyond recovery, and when they are gone we accept that loss the same way that we accept the deaths of people from the past.
In the same way, that it’s sad when someone dies unnecessarily today, it would be sad for certain traditions that we have today to be lost. We also close the door on evolutions of those traditions and experiences downstream from those things that lead to valuable mind states.
I am less concerned about traditions that are dropped by lack of interest in the far future because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.