In general: if the value-of-information is larger than the cost-of-thinking for a given challenge, then for such challenges it is prudent to think until you have a real answer.
If you have a policy of not thinking soundly on specifically the big challenges, where the thinking costs are very large (and yet they are still smaller than the VoI), you will fail to optimize specifically the giant choices where actual methodical thinking would have been very very worth it.
If voting is a way to aggregate the best-effort thinking of wise people, then voting methods that throw away mentally lazy people’s votes at just the time that their laziness will cause a catastrophe of bad planning… maybe that’s good?
((I’m not saying that “you should not give people, subject to violent top-down regulations, the right to opt-out of the plan.” Exit rights are sacred.
Wise and benevolent governors should and will ask if the people being governed have any objections and then either teach them why they are wrong to opt-out of a coordinated action, or else learn from the feedback of those who want to exit anyway.
In general, governors aren’t omniscient. Therefore they should (and will if wise) use policies that are likely to show them they are wrong before the wrongness leads to big bad outcomes.
However, despite this, if you are applying epistemics to planning itself, and using voting to make sure that a team of good thinkers are on the same page, such that the next round of discussion can or should proceed if lots of high quality thinkers turn out to have been thinking the same thing all along, then the additional property of “a preference-aggregation method being too complex to be used by lazy thinkers” might actually be a virtue?
I would much rather be using super high quality polling methods, instead of writing satires of highly regarded near-peers. But we live in this world, not the world that is ideal.))
In general: if the value-of-information is larger than the cost-of-thinking for a given challenge, then for such challenges it is prudent to think until you have a real answer.
If you have a policy of not thinking soundly on specifically the big challenges, where the thinking costs are very large (and yet they are still smaller than the VoI), you will fail to optimize specifically the giant choices where actual methodical thinking would have been very very worth it.
If voting is a way to aggregate the best-effort thinking of wise people, then voting methods that throw away mentally lazy people’s votes at just the time that their laziness will cause a catastrophe of bad planning… maybe that’s good?
((I’m not saying that “you should not give people, subject to violent top-down regulations, the right to opt-out of the plan.” Exit rights are sacred.
Wise and benevolent governors should and will ask if the people being governed have any objections and then either teach them why they are wrong to opt-out of a coordinated action, or else learn from the feedback of those who want to exit anyway.
In general, governors aren’t omniscient. Therefore they should (and will if wise) use policies that are likely to show them they are wrong before the wrongness leads to big bad outcomes.
However, despite this, if you are applying epistemics to planning itself, and using voting to make sure that a team of good thinkers are on the same page, such that the next round of discussion can or should proceed if lots of high quality thinkers turn out to have been thinking the same thing all along, then the additional property of “a preference-aggregation method being too complex to be used by lazy thinkers” might actually be a virtue?
I would much rather be using super high quality polling methods, instead of writing satires of highly regarded near-peers. But we live in this world, not the world that is ideal.))