You need to have a lot of trust in the people around you to end up with a plan like seasteading or prediction markets—and I notice that those ideas have been around for a long time without visibly generating a much saner & lower-conflict society, so it does not seem like that level of trust is justified.
I would say that it requires an advanced understanding of economics, incentives, and how society works, rather than trust in people. Understanding how a mechanism work reduces the requirement for trust. (They are complements in my mind.)
I think one of the reasons it would be hard to get a recently jailbroken not-that-intellectual person on-board with such a plan is that it would involve giving them novel understanding of how the world works that they do not have, which somehow people are rarely able to intentionally do, and it can easily fall back to an ask of “trust” that you know something the other person doesn’t, rather than a successful communication of understanding. And then after some number of weeks or months or years the world will introduce enough unpredictable noise that the trust will run out and the person will go back to using the world as they understand it, where they were never going to invent a concept like prediction markets.
...but hey, perhaps I’m not giving them enough credit, and actually they would ask themselves questions like “where does all of the cool technology and inventions around me come from” and start building up a model of science and of successful groups and start figuring out which sorts of reasoning actually work and what sorts of structures in society get good things done on purpose and then start to notice which parts of society can give you more of those powers and then start to see notice things like markets and personal freedoms and building mechanistic world models and more as ways to build up those forces in society.
On the one hand this path can take decades and most humans do not go down it. On the other hand the evidence required to build up a functional worldview is increasingly visible as technological progress has sped up over the centuries and so much of the world is viewable at home on a computer screen. Still, teaching anyone anything on purpose is hard in full generality, for some reason, and just as someone is having a crisis-of-faith is a hard time to have to bet on doing it successfully.
(Aside: This gives a more specific motive to explaining how the world works to a wider audience. “I don’t just think it’s generically nice for everyone to understand the world they live in, but I specifically am hoping that the next person to finally see the ways their society enacts evil doesn’t snap and themself do something stupid and evil, but is instead able to wield the true forces of the world to improve it.”)
I would say that it requires an advanced understanding of economics, incentives, and how society works, rather than trust in people. Understanding how a mechanism work reduces the requirement for trust. (They are complements in my mind.)
I think one of the reasons it would be hard to get a recently jailbroken not-that-intellectual person on-board with such a plan is that it would involve giving them novel understanding of how the world works that they do not have, which somehow people are rarely able to intentionally do, and it can easily fall back to an ask of “trust” that you know something the other person doesn’t, rather than a successful communication of understanding. And then after some number of weeks or months or years the world will introduce enough unpredictable noise that the trust will run out and the person will go back to using the world as they understand it, where they were never going to invent a concept like prediction markets.
...but hey, perhaps I’m not giving them enough credit, and actually they would ask themselves questions like “where does all of the cool technology and inventions around me come from” and start building up a model of science and of successful groups and start figuring out which sorts of reasoning actually work and what sorts of structures in society get good things done on purpose and then start to notice which parts of society can give you more of those powers and then start to see notice things like markets and personal freedoms and building mechanistic world models and more as ways to build up those forces in society.
On the one hand this path can take decades and most humans do not go down it. On the other hand the evidence required to build up a functional worldview is increasingly visible as technological progress has sped up over the centuries and so much of the world is viewable at home on a computer screen. Still, teaching anyone anything on purpose is hard in full generality, for some reason, and just as someone is having a crisis-of-faith is a hard time to have to bet on doing it successfully.
(Aside: This gives a more specific motive to explaining how the world works to a wider audience. “I don’t just think it’s generically nice for everyone to understand the world they live in, but I specifically am hoping that the next person to finally see the ways their society enacts evil doesn’t snap and themself do something stupid and evil, but is instead able to wield the true forces of the world to improve it.”)