I noticed that the parliamentary model of moral uncertainty can be framed as trying to import a “group rationality” mechanism into the “individual rationality” setting, to deal with subagents/subprocesses that appear in the individual setting. But usually when the individual rationality vs group rationality topic is brought up, it is to talk about how group rationality is much harder/less understood than individual rationality (here are two examples of what I mean). I can’t quite explain it, but I find it interesting/counter-intuitive/paradoxical that given this general background, there is a reversal here, where a solution in the group rationality setting is being imported to the individual rationality setting. (I think this might be related to why I’ve never found the parliamentary model quite convincing, but I’m not sure.)
Has anyone thought about this, or more generally about transferring mechanisms between the two settings?
I find it interesting to compare this post to Robin Hanson’s “Who Likes Simple Rules?”. In your post, when people’s interests don’t align, they have to switch to a simple/clear mechanism to demonstrate alignment. In Robin Hanson’s post, people’s interests “secretly align”, and it is the simple/clear mechanism that isn’t aligned, so people switch to subtle/complicated mechanisms to preserve alignment. Overall I feel pretty confused about when I should expect norms/rules to remain complicated or become simpler as groups scale.
I am a little confused about the large group sizes for some of your examples. For example, the vegan one doesn’t seem to depend on a large group size: even among one’s close friends or family, one might not want to bother explaining all the edge cases for when one will eat meat.