To reply more substantively on “what’s the point of this sequence?”
It’s mostly not to explain how norms evolve over millennia.
It’s to look at “okay, we in the rationality community where we have some shared structures for thinking and deciding, how can we do better here?”.
A lot of my posts here are a response to what we seem to be doing by default, which is mostly an elaborate way of saying “please stop”. In some cases I’m saying “I think we can actually do well here using our rationalist framesowrks”, but there are specific, constrained ways I think it is possible to do well, and people weren’t thinking about the constraints.
i.e. by default, I observe people fighting over norms in vaguely defined social clusters, which seems ill-advised. Vaguely defined social clusters are pourous, people come and go. For norm experimentation, I think it’s really important to have small groups where you can heavily filter people, and have high fidelity communication. (which I think means you and I are on the same page)
I think there are other non-norm coordination systems that can scale in other ways. Developing microcovid.org is an example, as is the LessWrong Review system, as is developing new grantmaking-body-procedures.
For norm experimentation, I think it’s really important to have small groups where you can heavily filter people, and have high fidelity communication. (which I think means you and I are on the same page)
To reply more substantively on “what’s the point of this sequence?”
It’s mostly not to explain how norms evolve over millennia.
It’s to look at “okay, we in the rationality community where we have some shared structures for thinking and deciding, how can we do better here?”.
A lot of my posts here are a response to what we seem to be doing by default, which is mostly an elaborate way of saying “please stop”. In some cases I’m saying “I think we can actually do well here using our rationalist framesowrks”, but there are specific, constrained ways I think it is possible to do well, and people weren’t thinking about the constraints.
i.e. by default, I observe people fighting over norms in vaguely defined social clusters, which seems ill-advised. Vaguely defined social clusters are pourous, people come and go. For norm experimentation, I think it’s really important to have small groups where you can heavily filter people, and have high fidelity communication. (which I think means you and I are on the same page)
I think there are other non-norm coordination systems that can scale in other ways. Developing microcovid.org is an example, as is the LessWrong Review system, as is developing new grantmaking-body-procedures.
We’re on the same page here.