To me, the best justification for min-maxing is that people who don’t optimize for coalitional politics will tend to be losers in coalition politics, and philosophers are supposed to pursue truth, often at the expense of coalitional positioning
Could you elaborate on this? ETA: Are you saying that philosophers tend to be at the bottom of the social pecking order, so they tend to support views which support people at the bottom having nice things? Interesting hypothesis. But I think prominent philosophers at least are usually decently high in the pecking order. I have been toying with the idea that we could derive minimax(or something like it) from bargaining in situations with an offense-defence imbalance(arguably applies to humans since the invention of weapons), so low-rank people have the option of spitefully nuking everything if their position is bad enough.
While famous philosophers tend to be decently high in social ranking as determined by education level, money, etc, they’re also likely to have people gang up on them. E.g. Socrates being killed, Galileo being condemned, Spinoza being excommunicated… And there are a lot of good philosophical thinkers we haven’t heard of, who might have been ganged up on as well.
Being a philosopher could in general be considered a form of neurodivergence. People who think and act differently from others could use justice-related protections that also protect other people who think and act differently from others. Updating all the way to min-max is a bit much, but there’s something to the heuristic. Over my life I’ve updated towards thinking that truth-seeking flags someone for coalitional scapegoating and that thinking about coalitions is important to maintaining a truth-seeking orientation.
Could you elaborate on this? ETA: Are you saying that philosophers tend to be at the bottom of the social pecking order, so they tend to support views which support people at the bottom having nice things? Interesting hypothesis. But I think prominent philosophers at least are usually decently high in the pecking order. I have been toying with the idea that we could derive minimax(or something like it) from bargaining in situations with an offense-defence imbalance(arguably applies to humans since the invention of weapons), so low-rank people have the option of spitefully nuking everything if their position is bad enough.
While famous philosophers tend to be decently high in social ranking as determined by education level, money, etc, they’re also likely to have people gang up on them. E.g. Socrates being killed, Galileo being condemned, Spinoza being excommunicated… And there are a lot of good philosophical thinkers we haven’t heard of, who might have been ganged up on as well.
Being a philosopher could in general be considered a form of neurodivergence. People who think and act differently from others could use justice-related protections that also protect other people who think and act differently from others. Updating all the way to min-max is a bit much, but there’s something to the heuristic. Over my life I’ve updated towards thinking that truth-seeking flags someone for coalitional scapegoating and that thinking about coalitions is important to maintaining a truth-seeking orientation.