As I mentioned in a bunch of comments, I think “loose social movement that centrally coordinates via vibes and whoever is currently the highest-prestige thought-leader” is a format that is both low on coherence/coordination and high on ability to be co-opted.
Indeed I would feel a lot better about AI Safety/EA/Rationality on a lot of these dimensions if there was more formal membership, more things like courts, etc.
The worry here is that we have chosen a fundamental form of social organization that scores low on defensibility and high on resource aquisition, and moving away from that is now very difficult. Many alternatives (both in the “less coordinated” and the “more coordinated” directions) seem to me to be more defensible here.
Or to phrase it in the terms of the post:
I wish we either conquered less, or had more of a plan for how to defend what we conquered. Right now we are doing a lot of conquering, but without any plan for how to defend it, and that seems like it really has a pretty high chance of going badly.
Literal courts are expensive, but there’s a larger design space if we relax the constraints. Courts have to scale to state-size, interoperate with a huge variety of participants (lawyers, judges, police, other officers, and arbitrary citizens), be robust to certain kids of adversarial attacks, …
My cached thought is to have a norm of “if you’re occupying an important exclusive social niche, such as company leader, thought leader, etc., then you have an obligation to debate representatives from major disagreeing relevant views”. May require infrastructure for better debates to go well.
As I mentioned in a bunch of comments, I think “loose social movement that centrally coordinates via vibes and whoever is currently the highest-prestige thought-leader” is a format that is both low on coherence/coordination and high on ability to be co-opted.
Indeed I would feel a lot better about AI Safety/EA/Rationality on a lot of these dimensions if there was more formal membership, more things like courts, etc.
The worry here is that we have chosen a fundamental form of social organization that scores low on defensibility and high on resource aquisition, and moving away from that is now very difficult. Many alternatives (both in the “less coordinated” and the “more coordinated” directions) seem to me to be more defensible here.
Or to phrase it in the terms of the post:
I wish we either conquered less, or had more of a plan for how to defend what we conquered. Right now we are doing a lot of conquering, but without any plan for how to defend it, and that seems like it really has a pretty high chance of going badly.
Good point.
Literal courts are expensive, but there’s a larger design space if we relax the constraints. Courts have to scale to state-size, interoperate with a huge variety of participants (lawyers, judges, police, other officers, and arbitrary citizens), be robust to certain kids of adversarial attacks, …
My cached thought is to have a norm of “if you’re occupying an important exclusive social niche, such as company leader, thought leader, etc., then you have an obligation to debate representatives from major disagreeing relevant views”. May require infrastructure for better debates to go well.