I think that this post has something to say about political philosophy. The problem as I see it is that we want to understand how our local decision-making affects the global picture and what constraints should we put on our local decisions. This is extremely important because, arguably, people make a lot of local decisions that make us globally worse off: such as pollution (“externalities” in econo-speak). I don’t buy the author’s belief that we should ignore these global constraints: they are clearly important—indeed its the fear of the potential global outcomes of careless local decision-making that arguably led to the creation of this website.
However, just like a computers we have a lot of trouble integrating the global constraints into our decision-making (which is necessarily a local operation), and we probably have a great deal of bias in our estimates of what is the morally best set of choices for us to make. Just like the algorithm we would like to find some way to make the computational burden on us less in order to achieve these moral ends.
There is an approach in economics to understand social norms advocated by Herbert Gintis [PDF] that is able to analyze these sorts of scenarios. The essential idea is this: agents can engage in multiple correlated equilibria (these are a generalized version of Nash equilibria) possible as a result of various social norms. These correlated equilibria are, in a sense, patched together by a social norm from the “rational” (self-interested, local expected utility maximizers) agents’ decisions. Human rights could definitely be understood in this light (I think: I haven’t actually worked out the model).
Similar reasoning may also be used to understand certain types of laws and government policies. It is via these institutions (norms, human organizations, etc.) that we may efficiently impose global constraints on people’s local decision-making. The karma system, for instance, on Less wrong probably changes the way that people make their decision to comment.
There is a probably a computer science—economics crossover paper here that would describe how institutions can lower the computational burden on individuals in their decision-making: so that when individuals make decisions in these simpler domains we can be sure that we will still be globally better off.
One word of caution is that this is precisely the rational behind “command economies” and these didn’t work out so well during the 20th century. So choosing the “patching together” institution well is absolutely essential.
I think that this post has something to say about political philosophy. The problem as I see it is that we want to understand how our local decision-making affects the global picture and what constraints should we put on our local decisions. This is extremely important because, arguably, people make a lot of local decisions that make us globally worse off: such as pollution (“externalities” in econo-speak). I don’t buy the author’s belief that we should ignore these global constraints: they are clearly important—indeed its the fear of the potential global outcomes of careless local decision-making that arguably led to the creation of this website.
However, just like a computers we have a lot of trouble integrating the global constraints into our decision-making (which is necessarily a local operation), and we probably have a great deal of bias in our estimates of what is the morally best set of choices for us to make. Just like the algorithm we would like to find some way to make the computational burden on us less in order to achieve these moral ends.
There is an approach in economics to understand social norms advocated by Herbert Gintis [PDF] that is able to analyze these sorts of scenarios. The essential idea is this: agents can engage in multiple correlated equilibria (these are a generalized version of Nash equilibria) possible as a result of various social norms. These correlated equilibria are, in a sense, patched together by a social norm from the “rational” (self-interested, local expected utility maximizers) agents’ decisions. Human rights could definitely be understood in this light (I think: I haven’t actually worked out the model).
Similar reasoning may also be used to understand certain types of laws and government policies. It is via these institutions (norms, human organizations, etc.) that we may efficiently impose global constraints on people’s local decision-making. The karma system, for instance, on Less wrong probably changes the way that people make their decision to comment.
There is a probably a computer science—economics crossover paper here that would describe how institutions can lower the computational burden on individuals in their decision-making: so that when individuals make decisions in these simpler domains we can be sure that we will still be globally better off.
One word of caution is that this is precisely the rational behind “command economies” and these didn’t work out so well during the 20th century. So choosing the “patching together” institution well is absolutely essential.