Hmm, I’ll have to look into the predictive power thing, and the tradeoff between predictive power and efficiency. I figured viewing society as an organism would drastically improve computational efficiency over trying to reason about and then aggregate individual people’s preferences, so that any drop in predictive power might be worth it. But I’m not sure I’ve seen evidence in either direction; I just assumed it based on analogy and priors.
As for why you should care, I don’t think you should, necessarily, if you don’t already. But I think for a lot of people, serving some kind of emergent structure or higher ideal is an important source of existential fulfillment.
Sorry, when I said “predictive power”, I was actually assuming normalization for efficiency. That is, my claim that the total predictive capacity you get for your available computation resources is greatest by taking the physical stance in this case.
Hmm, I’ll have to look into the predictive power thing, and the tradeoff between predictive power and efficiency. I figured viewing society as an organism would drastically improve computational efficiency over trying to reason about and then aggregate individual people’s preferences, so that any drop in predictive power might be worth it. But I’m not sure I’ve seen evidence in either direction; I just assumed it based on analogy and priors.
As for why you should care, I don’t think you should, necessarily, if you don’t already. But I think for a lot of people, serving some kind of emergent structure or higher ideal is an important source of existential fulfillment.
Sorry, when I said “predictive power”, I was actually assuming normalization for efficiency. That is, my claim that the total predictive capacity you get for your available computation resources is greatest by taking the physical stance in this case.