We share vastly more values in common—like a tree rooted in "reality" with increasingly thinner branches exploring possibility—than those values which appear to divide us.
And we can find effective agreement by traversing that tree, from our individual leaves and branches toward the thicker branches that support our groups, and further toward the trunk rooted in what we consider the "laws" of physics.
But do we, the people, have the will and the wisdom?
We share vastly more values in common—like a tree rooted in "reality" with increasingly thinner branches exploring possibility—than those values which appear to divide us.
And we can find effective agreement by traversing that tree, from our individual leaves and branches toward the thicker branches that support our groups, and further toward the trunk rooted in what we consider the "laws" of physics.
But do we, the people, have the will and the wisdom?
The power of networks vs undue concentration of power.
Worthy of deep consideration.
Do we, the people, have the necessary will and wisdom?
It's unfortunate—and an opportunity for improvement—that 'anarchy' and 'anarchism' as a movement are terms defined in relation to what they are _not_.
#anarchy #anarchism #socialDecisionMaking #collaborative
#cooperative
#bottomUp
#grassroots
#participatory
#decentralization
Agree that human nature, common sense, and popular culture tend to perpetuate lack of interest in seeing the bigger picture — or even recognizing that there might be one.
We fail to see that "more is different", and that what worked for our ancestors in small tribes no longer works at the scale of our global community. And especially in the US perhaps, individualism as identity leads to blind denial of collective approaches to problems/opportunities that exceed the grasp of individuals or small groups.
Issues that cross geopolitical borders, or involve multiple domains of knowledge—exceeding the context of meaning-making or scope of application of present-day agents—are opportunities for bigger-picture cognition augmented by machine intelligence.
Examples include creating and maintaining our evolving models of values—multi-layered, complex, and fine-grained—and our models of instrumental methods (science & technologies) for the promotion of those values into the future we discover by creating it.
But before we let ourselves depend too much on tools for thought that we don't adequately understand, we need to improve our philosophies of trust, reputation, values/preferences, decision-making, … ah, never mind. I got carried away considering the possibilities.
I suppose humans don't really care about bigger-picture thinking when there are more tangible opportunities right in front of us: using machine intelligence to more easily compete against our neighbors in business, defeat our enemies in war, and to increasingly amuse ourselves with decreasing effort…
#HumanNature #CulturalEvolution #SystemsThinking #Cooperation #individualism #collectivism #CollectiveCognition #SocialDecisionMaking
I'm moved to take out an idea of mine from storage after 20+ years:
Suggest that a #MachineLearning system, processing #LLM (large language models) like #ChatGPT could build a model of human values (hierarchical & fine-grained) and their expression within various contexts, and then—derive a metric for the hierarchical coherence of identified values in terms of #MutualInformation (not just simple co-occurence, but including contexts within contexts over time.)
"We might not get what we deserve, but we deserve what we get." said my father, and after shaking my head at the apparent illogic, I realized it was wise commentary on people's general lack of responsibility for #SocialDecisionmaking, #Consumerism, and the decline in public discourse.
With the recent hype around automatic text generation, I'm reminded that #Attention and #Trust don't scale well, and it's up to us to promote #Quality — or not.
I've been thinking hard about this for a couple decades now. Robert Wright's Non-Zero was a catalyst.
Couple points:
We now have the tech to allow us to collaborate and solve problems that exceed individual cognition.
We need evolving models of 1) our values—hierarchical and fine-grained, like the branches of a tree growing into the adjacent possible, and 2) our methods for their promotion into a future we discover by creating it.
We actually do have competing interests, but they are like the very tips of the branches of a tree of shared values, and we will find increasing agreement as we traverse the tree along ever-thickening branches of values in common toward branches that support us all.
#Values #Agreement #SocialDecisionMaking #Morality #Cooperation
Jef Allbright
Caroline Harbison