Great post. To the extent that progress can be made on this, it seems extremely important.
A question on your HCH scepticism:
going to fail in basically the same ways as real bureaucracies and for basically the same underlying reasons
I’d be interested if you could elaborate on that. To me it seems HCH shares some elements of bureaucracy, but that there are important differences.
My thoughts:
They share the property of not reliably optimising for the task they’re given (HCH is best considered a sovereign, not an oracle: it’s an oracle iff it wants to be).
They differ in terms of common purpose: the Hs in HCH have all their non-selfish values in common. To the extent that they’re optimising to achieve something in the world, it’s the same something.
Internal value conflict is likely a problem here, but perhaps avoidable with the right H?
Given (2), and strong HCH, it should be possible to adopt whatever enlightened form of organisational structure is desired. As a standard bureaucracy scales, it’s hard to avoid friction, fragmentation, in-fighting, communication failures… - but a lot of this is due to disparate values, assumptions and incentives.
Overall it’s not clear to me that HCH will fail to do something useful. On the other hand, I do agree that long reflection seems to be one of the least HCH-friendly tasks (unless individual Hs have much more than one day). Long reflection would seem to require the Hs to change significantly during the process.
Great post. To the extent that progress can be made on this, it seems extremely important.
A question on your HCH scepticism:
I’d be interested if you could elaborate on that. To me it seems HCH shares some elements of bureaucracy, but that there are important differences.
My thoughts:
They share the property of not reliably optimising for the task they’re given (HCH is best considered a sovereign, not an oracle: it’s an oracle iff it wants to be).
They differ in terms of common purpose: the Hs in HCH have all their non-selfish values in common. To the extent that they’re optimising to achieve something in the world, it’s the same something.
Internal value conflict is likely a problem here, but perhaps avoidable with the right H?
Given (2), and strong HCH, it should be possible to adopt whatever enlightened form of organisational structure is desired. As a standard bureaucracy scales, it’s hard to avoid friction, fragmentation, in-fighting, communication failures… - but a lot of this is due to disparate values, assumptions and incentives.
Overall it’s not clear to me that HCH will fail to do something useful.
On the other hand, I do agree that long reflection seems to be one of the least HCH-friendly tasks (unless individual Hs have much more than one day). Long reflection would seem to require the Hs to change significantly during the process.
Response here.