[FRIAM] Tragedy of the Commons & Free Riders

[Eric Charles]

I'm not sure "optimism" is the point of disagreement, beyond maybe optimism
regarding our ability to probabilistically manipulate development
trajectories.

Our task... is to classify which infrastructure increases liberty. And to
> engineer it into place.


Yes, at least in the abstract I think we agree on that. The next question,
I think, is whether we can find a way to characterize the types of
infrastructure that tend to be good vs types that tend to be bad.
(Acknowledging all the potential pitfalls of trying to categorize.) My bias
is that, so much as efforts show to be possible, we have infrastructure
that builds better people, rather than towards infrastructure that makes it
impossible for people to behave badly.


> Your setup attributes more commitment/energy from the agents ... energy
> they don't have or are unwilling to spend on that organizing setup. I tend
> to regard the agents as less intelligent than you consider them, likely
> because I'm less intelligent than you are ... we all generalize from our
> selves.  I grok 0-intelligence agents because I am a 0-int agent! .


If I gave that impression, I apologize! Obviously your insinuation that I
generally prefer dealing with intelligent people is correct, but also I am
quite adverse to the idea that the world would be better if everyone
suddenly became much more intelligent. Intelligent people do stupid and
horrible things all the time, in the few intellectual/polymath groups .

To try to be more clear, I do *not* think we need to make people so
intelligent that they understand the "tragedy of the commons", and avoid it
due to their superior intellectual skills. I'm *just* saying that we make
people who, when they find themselves in such situations, behave in ways
that don't lead to tragedy. Can we do that with 100% accuracy? Probably
not. Or, at the least, not without methods I would probably judge
unethical. Could we arrange learning situations so that a much larger % of
the population avoided tragedy in such situations? For sure. Childrens TV,
video games with different rule sets, curricular lessons that engage
students in relevant situations without ever once mentioning the "tragedy"
or trying to reason it out explicitly, etc. The goal is to produce
"0-intelligence agents" that achieve better outcomes in commons-types of
situations, without having to think it through.

Some, who specialize in education, or other related topics, will later
learn why the curriculum is constructed in that way, but that's a different
conversation, for a much latter stage of life.

This happens all the time, quite effectively, but usually to shitty ends.
Laws, regulations, and engrained habits that disallowed the showing of
interracial couples on TV created generations that finds such things
"unnatural". Ditto any non-vanilla variety of sexual behavior and gender
identification. Flooding the airwaves the other direction is creating a
generation that, when in 0-intelligence mode, navigates through the world
quite differently. My kids are only a few years apart and I can see it
between them. We were watching the a cartoon and my older said something
like "It's great to see a show with all this gender representation and
without being judgy about sexuality", and my younger looked confused and
honestly asked "Why is that odd?"

I don't think it is overly optimistic to think we could make significant
progress on the issues you and I both care about with investment in *that *type
of infrastructure.




On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 5:48 AM ⛧ glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> We do agree in our values. But we disagree in our optimism. The ecology
> you propose burns more energy than mine. Your setup attributes more
> commitment/energy from the agents ... energy they don't have or are
> unwilling to spend on that organizing setup. I tend to regard the agents as
> less intelligent than you consider them, likely because I'm less
> intelligent than you are ... we all generalize from our selves. I grok
> 0-intelligence agents because I am a 0-int agent! You, having rolled up a
> good character at the start of the campaign, are deluded into thinking
> everyone else also rolled well. 8^D
>
> In Utopia, all the agents spend reasonable amounts of energy, along
> diverse channels, to drive the ecology. But in this world, government is a
> necessary efficiency. Throughout history, when we *rely* on the individuals
> to do all this diverse work, they don't, even if, in an ideal world, they
> could.
>
> So we build infrastructure, eg government, to make the individuals more
> effective, to channel whatever energy/intelligence they have.
>
> Where our worlds meet, though, is that SOME infrastructure is
> debilitating. And SOME infrastructure is liberating. We agree that
> liberating government is good. And debilitating government is bad.
>
> Our task, then, is to classify which infrastructure increases liberty. And
> to engineer it into place. But that's very hard when so many of us
> maintain, despite the evidence, that all infrastructure is always bad.
>
>
> On March 24, 2021 8:24:38 PM PDT, Eric Charles <
> eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
> >I think we probably pretty much agree.
> >
> >"It's a convenient fiction, or perhaps an approximating simplification"
> >---
> >Yes! But we need some of those, and "the individual" is one that
> >appeals to
> >me.
> >
> >
> --
> glen ⛧
>
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