I wouldn’t say Bacon’s scientific method is the only great idea that both promised and delivers on being massively beneficial to all mankind.
There are certain social principles that crop up again and again as well. For example, the idea that free people making their own decisions and setting their own goals are, in the long run, vastly more efficient at practically everything than top-down, centralized control.
It works surprisingly well wherever it’s tried, consistently out-performs the predictions of the centralizers, and, at this point, we’re even starting to understand the logical and mathematical basis for why it works.
And yet, somehow, most of its historical proponents are seen as crackpots or religious nuts.
I’m afraid I haven’t collected a definite list. I just notice when it pops up in the wide variety of materials I tend to read. For example, traffic studies showing better flow rates and safety when drivers are allowed more individual discretion. You’ll probably also find some stuff in Austrian economics with regard to how more freedom of choice allows for better optimization by making fuller use of the processing capability of each individual. And there have been a few references to it in business management studies about why micromanaging your employees almost invariably leads to worse productivity.
“Network Effects” is probably a good keyword if you want to go looking for such examples specifically. It seems to be a common phrase.
See also critical brain hypothesis; attempting to summarize my current understanding in english, seems like systems work together better if every node in the system is given enough information that no other part of the system can predict that node’s response, but every part of the system can trust that every other part of the system is well informed. Collective action works better when every node can contribute to what the collective action actually is; local free will is probably “useful chaos”. At least, that’s my current read of things. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwLb3XlPCB4 - an interesting implication of this is that it’s possible to have less free will, when you’re trying to be more disciplined and ignore parts of your own brain’s input; not a lot less, but less. see also https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35145021/
From the economics side of things, individual nodes having massive amounts of locally useful information, but it being very difficult to determine exactly which pieces of that information are globally relevant and it being completely impractical to ship and process every piece of that information at the global level is the fundamental problem that most “command economies” tend to run into.
indeed. since it came up—hence the need to move out of a centrally planned economy and into one where workers own their own planning ;) though of course most of the issue is the high extraction ratio of stocks compared to bounded forms of debt such as bounded loans. interest bearing loans are a significant fraction of the problem. this is all probably irrelevant to ai long term, but short term I really like the capped returns model as a starting point.
but re information availability—kademlia style information routing in latent space seems likely to suffice to me.
There are quite a few ways it can go wrong other than just central planning. Ultimately most of them come back to some special interest group attempting to forcibly subvert the economy to favor their own preferences.
High extraction ratios aren’t inherently problematic economically speaking since it’s not like the extracted resources simply vanish, and market forces tend to bring the extraction ratio down over time until it reaches the lowest level anyone’s willing to do the job for. But, high extraction ratios do make a tempting target for non-economic actions designed to preserve the lucrative ratio against the actions of the market.
I wouldn’t say Bacon’s scientific method is the only great idea that both promised and delivers on being massively beneficial to all mankind.
There are certain social principles that crop up again and again as well. For example, the idea that free people making their own decisions and setting their own goals are, in the long run, vastly more efficient at practically everything than top-down, centralized control.
It works surprisingly well wherever it’s tried, consistently out-performs the predictions of the centralizers, and, at this point, we’re even starting to understand the logical and mathematical basis for why it works.
And yet, somehow, most of its historical proponents are seen as crackpots or religious nuts.
What is the mathematical basis for people doing stuff at their own “free will”? I would appreciate some keywords or links.
I’m afraid I haven’t collected a definite list. I just notice when it pops up in the wide variety of materials I tend to read. For example, traffic studies showing better flow rates and safety when drivers are allowed more individual discretion. You’ll probably also find some stuff in Austrian economics with regard to how more freedom of choice allows for better optimization by making fuller use of the processing capability of each individual. And there have been a few references to it in business management studies about why micromanaging your employees almost invariably leads to worse productivity.
“Network Effects” is probably a good keyword if you want to go looking for such examples specifically. It seems to be a common phrase.
See also critical brain hypothesis; attempting to summarize my current understanding in english, seems like systems work together better if every node in the system is given enough information that no other part of the system can predict that node’s response, but every part of the system can trust that every other part of the system is well informed. Collective action works better when every node can contribute to what the collective action actually is; local free will is probably “useful chaos”. At least, that’s my current read of things. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwLb3XlPCB4 - an interesting implication of this is that it’s possible to have less free will, when you’re trying to be more disciplined and ignore parts of your own brain’s input; not a lot less, but less. see also https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35145021/
From the economics side of things, individual nodes having massive amounts of locally useful information, but it being very difficult to determine exactly which pieces of that information are globally relevant and it being completely impractical to ship and process every piece of that information at the global level is the fundamental problem that most “command economies” tend to run into.
indeed. since it came up—hence the need to move out of a centrally planned economy and into one where workers own their own planning ;) though of course most of the issue is the high extraction ratio of stocks compared to bounded forms of debt such as bounded loans. interest bearing loans are a significant fraction of the problem. this is all probably irrelevant to ai long term, but short term I really like the capped returns model as a starting point.
but re information availability—kademlia style information routing in latent space seems likely to suffice to me.
There are quite a few ways it can go wrong other than just central planning. Ultimately most of them come back to some special interest group attempting to forcibly subvert the economy to favor their own preferences.
High extraction ratios aren’t inherently problematic economically speaking since it’s not like the extracted resources simply vanish, and market forces tend to bring the extraction ratio down over time until it reaches the lowest level anyone’s willing to do the job for. But, high extraction ratios do make a tempting target for non-economic actions designed to preserve the lucrative ratio against the actions of the market.