“Society” doesn’t make decisions, groups of people make decisions. If every individual in the group understands how to avoid natural pitfalls, how to coordinate decisionmaking processes, how to take on board information from viewpoints which conflict with their own and incorporate what’s useful rather than throwing it out wholecloth, etc, then the collective decisionmaking ability of the group is improved.
Your project could benefit from increased obedience as you could just lead rationally and the others would follow. Disagreements between rational people can take a longer time to resolve, etc
The projects I participated in could have benefited from increased group obedience, if everyone simply followed my lead, but if the members lacked the reasoning ability to distinguish between competent leaders, how would they know who to trust to lead them?
In my experience, disagreements between genuinely rational people overwhelmingly do not take a longer time to resolve. One of the basic components of rationality is knowing how to take new information on board and actually change your mind. Disagreements between irrational people tend to be far more intractable.
“Society” doesn’t make decisions, groups of people make decisions.
The way society forms mass-opinions and decides (i.e. by voting) on important issues is not easily split into groups of people making decisions.
Still I accept your mechanism because group decisions are a large part of society and improving that will improve society.
About the group project: If we can get everyone to be “genuinely rational” instead of just a bit more rational we will certainly live in a very different world. I don’t expect that anytime soon though.
“Society” doesn’t make decisions, groups of people make decisions. If every individual in the group understands how to avoid natural pitfalls, how to coordinate decisionmaking processes, how to take on board information from viewpoints which conflict with their own and incorporate what’s useful rather than throwing it out wholecloth, etc, then the collective decisionmaking ability of the group is improved.
The projects I participated in could have benefited from increased group obedience, if everyone simply followed my lead, but if the members lacked the reasoning ability to distinguish between competent leaders, how would they know who to trust to lead them?
In my experience, disagreements between genuinely rational people overwhelmingly do not take a longer time to resolve. One of the basic components of rationality is knowing how to take new information on board and actually change your mind. Disagreements between irrational people tend to be far more intractable.
The way society forms mass-opinions and decides (i.e. by voting) on important issues is not easily split into groups of people making decisions.
Still I accept your mechanism because group decisions are a large part of society and improving that will improve society.
About the group project: If we can get everyone to be “genuinely rational” instead of just a bit more rational we will certainly live in a very different world. I don’t expect that anytime soon though.