Burn the witch!!… is what I was tempted to write, with no followup ;-)
On the other hand, I could see how it might be useful for social beings to coordinate their behavior with relatively little cognitive effort by collectively implementing relatively simple “witch finding and punishing heuristics” (perhaps with punishment of non-punishers mixed in?) while at the same making sure they never do anything that calls attention to themselves as a possible witch.
Personally, I would think that the deep problem with such a scenario is not that some people might be unjustifiably burned, but that particularly clever people might game the system, extracting value from other people in a way that doesn’t trigger a witch hunt, because the witch detecting heuristics probably have gaps. It would not surprise me if the practical upshot, absent a perfect “accounting” system for causal utility, was some amount of “cycling through moral fashions” due to iterated application of Goodhart’sLaw.
Burn the witch!!… is what I was tempted to write, with no followup ;-)
On the other hand, I could see how it might be useful for social beings to coordinate their behavior with relatively little cognitive effort by collectively implementing relatively simple “witch finding and punishing heuristics” (perhaps with punishment of non-punishers mixed in?) while at the same making sure they never do anything that calls attention to themselves as a possible witch.
Personally, I would think that the deep problem with such a scenario is not that some people might be unjustifiably burned, but that particularly clever people might game the system, extracting value from other people in a way that doesn’t trigger a witch hunt, because the witch detecting heuristics probably have gaps. It would not surprise me if the practical upshot, absent a perfect “accounting” system for causal utility, was some amount of “cycling through moral fashions” due to iterated application of Goodhart’s Law.