is rationality as a failure of compartmentalization—the attempt to take everything you hear seriously.
Many people enjoy reading books and watching films where the lead characters form a small group, pitted against all the odds to try to save the world. Many people—secular people—pay lip-service to the idea that every person in the world is equally important, and that we should value the life of an African peasant farmer as equal to our own.
It seems, however, that most people don’t actually take these notions seriously, because their actions seem to have little to do with such beliefs.
One day, a bunch of nerds got together and started a project called the Singularity Institute, and they actually took seriously the notion that they should try to save the world if it really was threatened, and that the lives of others should be assigned equal weigh to their own. Almost everyone else though they were really weird when they started to try to act on these beliefs.
no, no. The game is to counterfactually propose different states of the “government policy” node that involve making the government conform more to some ideology X, and then confabulate reasons why this would result in great success. In doing this, you signal your allegiance to ideology X.
But really, the game can work with pretty much anything in the place of the “government policy” node; it can be pretty much any decisionmaking entity, including the companies or diffuse classes of individuals. E.g.