I think something like what you’re sketching here, viz “harnessing technology to make people and civilization saner”, is probably highly valuable and possibly quite neglected.[1] Thank you for working on this.
A class of infrastructure/technologies that seem very important, but which I didn’t see mentioned in this post: infrastructure for creating common knowledge of better equilibria and coordinating transitions to them.[2] Do you (have plans to) address anything matching that (vague) description anywhere?
I.e., something that would solve problems of form “there exists a much better equilibrium, but getting there would require lots of people to have common knowledge of that better equilibrium, and also coordinate and sufficiently-credibly commit to near-simultaneously taking action that would be detrimental to them if they took it alone”. Some examples: move from frequentist stats to Bayesian stats; make it easier for AI labs to (conditionally) stop racing; US voters coordinate to vote for a less sociopathic party-independent candidate (or to replace first-past-the-post with a saner voting system entirely); abolish all JavaScript forever, refactor the Internet to use a non-insane language; kill Elsevier; almost everyone simultaneously leaves (at least the more toxic platforms of) social media (and move to a less toxic new platform); journals/researchers commit to preregistering studies and publishing negative results; etc.
Yeah, I like that. For me, it comes under coordination tech, which admittedly is a particularly thorny part of the map, and difficult. Ability to network and form coalitions, deliberate on models and prospects, and implement or commit to changes come under coordination, for me. Often there’d be an aspect of institution-installment or -adaptation, which deserves special care (forthcoming ‘charter tech’ discussion, name tbc). You’d also naturally want (individual foresight and collective) epistemics to be improved as an important support to that.
I think something like what you’re sketching here, viz “harnessing technology to make people and civilization saner”, is probably highly valuable and possibly quite neglected. [1] Thank you for working on this.
A class of infrastructure/technologies that seem very important, but which I didn’t see mentioned in this post: infrastructure for creating common knowledge of better equilibria and coordinating transitions to them. [2] Do you (have plans to) address anything matching that (vague) description anywhere?
Low-hanging dignity points!
I.e., something that would solve problems of form “there exists a much better equilibrium, but getting there would require lots of people to have common knowledge of that better equilibrium, and also coordinate and sufficiently-credibly commit to near-simultaneously taking action that would be detrimental to them if they took it alone”. Some examples: move from frequentist stats to Bayesian stats; make it easier for AI labs to (conditionally) stop racing; US voters coordinate to vote for a less sociopathic party-independent candidate (or to replace first-past-the-post with a saner voting system entirely); abolish all JavaScript forever, refactor the Internet to use a non-insane language; kill Elsevier; almost everyone simultaneously leaves (at least the more toxic platforms of) social media (and move to a less toxic new platform); journals/researchers commit to preregistering studies and publishing negative results; etc.
Yeah, I like that. For me, it comes under coordination tech, which admittedly is a particularly thorny part of the map, and difficult. Ability to network and form coalitions, deliberate on models and prospects, and implement or commit to changes come under coordination, for me. Often there’d be an aspect of institution-installment or -adaptation, which deserves special care (forthcoming ‘charter tech’ discussion, name tbc). You’d also naturally want (individual foresight and collective) epistemics to be improved as an important support to that.