Thoughts on LessWrongness
I want to have a small list of fundamental thoughts about which I’m probably wrong and need to update. Let’s start with
Once upon a time I did think of myself as a utilitarian, trying clumsily to judge my actions by their contributions towards the greatest good for the greatest number and all that. Nowadays I think of utilitarianism as the classical mechanics of ethical philosophy: immensely useful (pun unavoidable) but fundamentally wrong in that it assumes that there is a reference frame from which this can be evaluated; it leaves it for quantum mechanics and general relativity to deal with the fact that information is always local. Classical mechanics lets you talk about rigid bodies — intuitive and helpful, but if there were rigid bodies in the real world then we could use them to send information faster than light and we could use them for arbitrarily small manipulations. In ethics, it leads to statements like
WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise – by Scott Alexander – Astral Codex Ten
“What’s the best form of government? Benevolent dictatorship, obviously, just get the best person in the country and let her fix everything. But everyone realizes this is easier said than done; the procedure to pick the best person is corruptible. At one point we tried a very simple best-person-picking procedure that really should have worked and ended up choosing Donald Trump as the best person.”
I think that the “obviously” proceeds from a view towards an aggregate utility calculation, one which is getting frequent Bayesian updates, by someone who’s best at doing it, and we just need a less-corruptible person-picking process. But…No, that’s not the problem. The problem is that there is no such best person in the country for fixing “everything”, there never will be such a person, there cannot be such a person, and the attempts by left and right and others to elect such a person and let them fix everything are inherently corrupt. So it is not the case that “everyone realizes” any part of this. In particular, I don’t.
I now think of myself as a hierarchically local Hayekian consensualist, and isn’t that a mouthful? Don’t try to maximize other people’s utilities, don’t try to outguess their “revealed preferences” to see what they really value, just see what they consent to. If a decision can be made by an individual, it should be. If it needs a group decision procedure, then let the group be as small as possible in order to maximize the extent to which those affected consent, not only to the decision procedure (voting? Well, sometimes) but to the actual decision.
Another way to say it is that I now value autonomy, autonomy of person or group within group, somewhat more than “being right.”
Of course this immediately raises issues such as — who counts as consenting, anyway? Who is a Who, and can Horton really hear them? What if nobody consents to anything except “To crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of their women.” Apart from Conan’s gender stereotyping there, that does sound like a description of the desires of self-described progressives and conservatives alike. And maybe my consensualism doesn’t actually get anywhere anyway…. But actually, I think it might.
In the specific context of Scott’s quote above, think about the power of Dr. Fauci to “make decisions that will affect billions of dollars in wealth, Senate seats, Twitter likes, and other extremely valuable resources.” That’s an Inadequate Equilibrium and we can go on thinking about incentives, but those incentives are necessary (I think) consequences of saying that the Officially Approved Experts should choose for everybody. In my world, the CDC and FDA and so on would not exist in their current form. Instead, there would be a category of Officially Calibrated Experts with score-cards, and they would be not be in the business of making requirements or even recommendations because that doesn’t respect people’s (or groups’) autonomy, they’d just be making models to imply structures of conditional predictions so that maximally local groups could set recommendations or even requirements for themselves. Not power to the people, but autonomy (as far as possible) to each person.
Or then again, maybe not.
(Update: Perhaps I should mention that there would therefore be no such thing as an FDA “approval”; I’d expect individuals to choose what they pay for themselves, insurance companies to choose what specific policies should include, and governmental units to choose what they require taxpayers to subsidize…but the issue would not be one of approval or not. And yes, it would get complicated. Or then again, maybe not.)
Daily Bayes 