(I apologize in advance if this is too far afield of the intended purpose of this post)
How does the claim that “group agents require membranes” interact with the widespread support for dramatically reducing or eliminating restrictions to immigration (“open borders” for short) within the EA/LW community? I can think of several possibilities, but I’m not sure which is true:
There actually isn’t much support for open borders
Open borders supporters believe that “group agents require membranes” is a reasonable generaliation, but borders are not a relevant kind of “membrane”, or nations are not “group agents” in the relevant sense
The people who support open borders generally aren’t the same people who are thinking about group agency at all
Open borders supporters have thought about group agency and concluded that “group agents require membranes” is not a reasonable generalization
Open borders supporters believe that there is no need for nations to have group agency
Something else I haven’t thought of
Context: I have an intuition that reduced/eliminated immigration restrictions reduce global coordination, and this post helped me crystallize it (if nations have less group agency, it’s harder to coordinate)
This definitely seems like a relevant application of the question (different specific topic that I was thinking about when writing the OP, but the fully fleshed out theory I was aiming at would have some kind of answer here)
My off-the-cuff-made-up-guess is that there is some threshold of borders that matters for group agency, but if your borders are sufficiently permeable already, there’s not much benefit to marginally increasing them. Like, I notice that I don’t feel much benefit to the US having stronger borders because it’s already a giant melting pot. But I have some sense that Japan actually benefits from group homogeneity, by getting to have some cultural tech that is impossible in melting-pot cities.
(I notice that I am pretty confused about how to resolve some conflicted principles, like, I do in fact think there’s a benefit to open borders for general “increased trade and freedom has a bunch of important benefits” reasons, and I also think there are benefits to careful standards for group membership, and I don’t know how to trade those off. I think that a lot of cultural benefits are really hard to pull off)
I think the people who are anti open borders are thinking roughly in terms of “we can’t coordinate on having particular principles if anyone can just show up whenever” (although many of them don’t think through any explicit game theory).
(I apologize in advance if this is too far afield of the intended purpose of this post)
How does the claim that “group agents require membranes” interact with the widespread support for dramatically reducing or eliminating restrictions to immigration (“open borders” for short) within the EA/LW community? I can think of several possibilities, but I’m not sure which is true:
There actually isn’t much support for open borders
Open borders supporters believe that “group agents require membranes” is a reasonable generaliation, but borders are not a relevant kind of “membrane”, or nations are not “group agents” in the relevant sense
The people who support open borders generally aren’t the same people who are thinking about group agency at all
Open borders supporters have thought about group agency and concluded that “group agents require membranes” is not a reasonable generalization
Open borders supporters believe that there is no need for nations to have group agency
Something else I haven’t thought of
Context: I have an intuition that reduced/eliminated immigration restrictions reduce global coordination, and this post helped me crystallize it (if nations have less group agency, it’s harder to coordinate)
This definitely seems like a relevant application of the question (different specific topic that I was thinking about when writing the OP, but the fully fleshed out theory I was aiming at would have some kind of answer here)
My off-the-cuff-made-up-guess is that there is some threshold of borders that matters for group agency, but if your borders are sufficiently permeable already, there’s not much benefit to marginally increasing them. Like, I notice that I don’t feel much benefit to the US having stronger borders because it’s already a giant melting pot. But I have some sense that Japan actually benefits from group homogeneity, by getting to have some cultural tech that is impossible in melting-pot cities.
(I notice that I am pretty confused about how to resolve some conflicted principles, like, I do in fact think there’s a benefit to open borders for general “increased trade and freedom has a bunch of important benefits” reasons, and I also think there are benefits to careful standards for group membership, and I don’t know how to trade those off. I think that a lot of cultural benefits are really hard to pull off)
I think the people who are anti open borders are thinking roughly in terms of “we can’t coordinate on having particular principles if anyone can just show up whenever” (although many of them don’t think through any explicit game theory).