Fair enough. I kind of threw that line in there as a self-deprecating joke as I repeatedly kept thinking “come on, I really feel like I am saying things that are so obviously just in the water and so self-evident in common-sense morality, that it must just read as trite to any readers” during writing.
It really feels to me like the basic reasoning here is really very standard, though surprisingly untouched by LessWrong, and maybe the better pointer towards it is “classical liberalism”? I don’t know, if someone has a better pointer towards the existing thinking on this topic, happy to switch it out.
The problem with Federalism isn’t that it doesn’t capture the idea, it’s that it also requires stable delegation and authority, which this post really isn’t about. It’d partly subsidiarity, or autonomy, but also state capacity mismatch, and Fukuyama’s discussions of decay, and institutional drift, or maybe closer to fragility of complex systems, and the way they fail? (Charles Perrow’s work, specifically.)
But I think you’re talking about it differently than any of those alone, and none have a simple term for this.
Fair enough. I kind of threw that line in there as a self-deprecating joke as I repeatedly kept thinking “come on, I really feel like I am saying things that are so obviously just in the water and so self-evident in common-sense morality, that it must just read as trite to any readers” during writing.
It really feels to me like the basic reasoning here is really very standard, though surprisingly untouched by LessWrong, and maybe the better pointer towards it is “classical liberalism”? I don’t know, if someone has a better pointer towards the existing thinking on this topic, happy to switch it out.
The problem with Federalism isn’t that it doesn’t capture the idea, it’s that it also requires stable delegation and authority, which this post really isn’t about. It’d partly subsidiarity, or autonomy, but also state capacity mismatch, and Fukuyama’s discussions of decay, and institutional drift, or maybe closer to fragility of complex systems, and the way they fail? (Charles Perrow’s work, specifically.)
But I think you’re talking about it differently than any of those alone, and none have a simple term for this.