I think the piece does point to some interventions that we could deploy right now that would improve high-level decision making. For example, Experiment With Promising Ideas:
My home civilization, as you might guess, makes a huge deal out of the virtue of being fast to adapt: fast to respond to facts, fast to update and change policies. And if Sinyelt was right, the cost of people moving geographically was interfering with that virtue. So they built a test city—dath ilan had a concept of “let’s build a test city”—where houses were mated to modular foundations.
The line between what is the fruit of a saner society, and what is an intervention that will lead to a saner society seems blurry to me though. You could argue that Experiment With Promising Ideas is something that is impractical because we’re not sane enough yet, and we have to get more sane first before trying to implement it. Or you could argue that it’s something that we are capable of doing right now, and that it’s part of the path towards sanity.
Here are some other excerpts from My April Fools Day Confession that might address your question:
It’s not the evidence-based massage therapists who’ve been iterating their art with randomized experiments and competitions for 350 years
In the world of dath ilan, everyone learns at age 9 about Nash equilibria, and there is a concept of a making a collective and virtuous effort to get past them. So as soon as computers and batteries were good enough to autopilot electric cars in a system of tunnels, the thing was done.
And now I’m talking about how the economy worked, so I’ll go ahead and talk about some other things that dath ilan considered obvious. The medical profession was divided into junior diagnosticians, whose main job was to diagnose the obvious and know when the obvious had been called into doubt; and senior diagnosticians, who were highly paid and high-IQ and shadarak-trained, who could apply Bayes’s Rule in their sleep, and memorized all the prior probabilities, and had computers, and were graded on their probability calibrations.
By which I mean that there would be centralized development of movies you watched on your own, and the training-games you played in what I won’t insult by calling it a school, and experiments to find out which variations worked.
And even with respect to thorium power plants, China could offer a billion dollars in prize money to whichever group submitted a workable design for a liquid flouride thorium reactor, and another billion to the best iteration of that design, and another billion dollars divided up among people who found bugs, and then Earth’s civilization would have effective nuclear power plants. It was a bit more complicated than that in dath ilan, though it’s not like I was ever wise enough to look up the details. But I know that dath ilan had an established system for dividing prize money among contributors and checking for errors.
I think the piece does point to some interventions that we could deploy right now that would improve high-level decision making. For example, Experiment With Promising Ideas:
The line between what is the fruit of a saner society, and what is an intervention that will lead to a saner society seems blurry to me though. You could argue that Experiment With Promising Ideas is something that is impractical because we’re not sane enough yet, and we have to get more sane first before trying to implement it. Or you could argue that it’s something that we are capable of doing right now, and that it’s part of the path towards sanity.
Here are some other excerpts from My April Fools Day Confession that might address your question:
It’s not the evidence-based massage therapists who’ve been iterating their art with randomized experiments and competitions for 350 years
In the world of dath ilan, everyone learns at age 9 about Nash equilibria, and there is a concept of a making a collective and virtuous effort to get past them. So as soon as computers and batteries were good enough to autopilot electric cars in a system of tunnels, the thing was done.
And now I’m talking about how the economy worked, so I’ll go ahead and talk about some other things that dath ilan considered obvious. The medical profession was divided into junior diagnosticians, whose main job was to diagnose the obvious and know when the obvious had been called into doubt; and senior diagnosticians, who were highly paid and high-IQ and shadarak-trained, who could apply Bayes’s Rule in their sleep, and memorized all the prior probabilities, and had computers, and were graded on their probability calibrations.
By which I mean that there would be centralized development of movies you watched on your own, and the training-games you played in what I won’t insult by calling it a school, and experiments to find out which variations worked.
And even with respect to thorium power plants, China could offer a billion dollars in prize money to whichever group submitted a workable design for a liquid flouride thorium reactor, and another billion to the best iteration of that design, and another billion dollars divided up among people who found bugs, and then Earth’s civilization would have effective nuclear power plants. It was a bit more complicated than that in dath ilan, though it’s not like I was ever wise enough to look up the details. But I know that dath ilan had an established system for dividing prize money among contributors and checking for errors.