I’ll mention here that from what little I saw, your coordination efforts seemed a bit misguided and harmful. I am left with a sense that you wanted everyone to be friends and not feel threatened by interacting with others, to feel like “come in, the water is fine, don’t worry, you won’t end up with people criticizing you for maybe ending civilization or self-deceiving along the way or call you unethical”. While I am pretty open to fairly respectful coordination and am a strong fan of finding positive-sum trade, I care more about being frank and honest in my interactions, and a route must be found where communicating such things (insofar as that’s what someone believes) isn’t going to destroy or end the coordination/trade agreement. Speaking the truth is not something to be traded away, however costly it may be.
I can’t comment on Conjecture specifically’s coordination efforts, but I fairly strongly disagree with this as a philosophy of coordination. There exist a lot of people in the world who have massive empirical or ethical disagreements with me that lead to them taking actions I think are misguided to actively harmful to extremely dangerous. But I think that this often is either logical or understandable from their perspective. I think that being able to communicate productively with these people. see things from their point of view, and work towards common ground is a valuable skill, and an important part of the spirit of cooperation. For example, I think that Leah Garces’s work cooperating with chicken farmers to reduce factory farming is admirable and worthwhile, and I imagine she isn’t always frank and honest with people.
In particular, I think that being frank and honest in this context can basically kill possible cooperation. And good cooperation can lead to things being better by everyone’s lights, so this is a large and important cost not worth taking lightly. Not everyone has to strive for cooperation, but I think it’s very important that at least some people do! I do think that being so cooperative that you lose track of what you personally believe can be misguided and corrosive, but that there’s a big difference between having clear internal beliefs and needing to express all of those beliefs.
I can’t comment on Conjecture specifically’s coordination efforts, but I fairly strongly disagree with this as a philosophy of coordination. There exist a lot of people in the world who have massive empirical or ethical disagreements with me that lead to them taking actions I think are misguided to actively harmful to extremely dangerous. But I think that this often is either logical or understandable from their perspective. I think that being able to communicate productively with these people. see things from their point of view, and work towards common ground is a valuable skill, and an important part of the spirit of cooperation. For example, I think that Leah Garces’s work cooperating with chicken farmers to reduce factory farming is admirable and worthwhile, and I imagine she isn’t always frank and honest with people.
In particular, I think that being frank and honest in this context can basically kill possible cooperation. And good cooperation can lead to things being better by everyone’s lights, so this is a large and important cost not worth taking lightly. Not everyone has to strive for cooperation, but I think it’s very important that at least some people do! I do think that being so cooperative that you lose track of what you personally believe can be misguided and corrosive, but that there’s a big difference between having clear internal beliefs and needing to express all of those beliefs.
Thanks for the link, I’ll aim to give that podcast a listen, it’s relevant to a bunch of my current thinking.