You’re right the conclusion is quite underspecified—how exactly do we build such a cooperation machine?
I don’t know yet, but my bet is more on engineering, product design, and infrastructure than on social science. More like building a better Reddit or Uber (or supporting infrastructure layers like WWW and the Internet) than like writing papers.
Okay, I see better now where you’re coming from and how you’re thinking that social science could be hopeless and yet we can still build a cooperation machine. I still suspect you’ll need some innovations in social science to implement such a machine. Even if we assume that we have a black box machine that does what you say, you still have to be sure that people will use the machine, so you’ll need enough understanding of social science to either predict that they will, or somehow get them to.
But even if you solve the problem of implementation, I suspect you’ll need innovations in social science in order to even design such a machine. In order to understand what kind of technology or infrastructure would increase trust, asabiyah, etc, you need to understand people. And maybe you think the understanding we already have of people with our current social science is already enough to tell us what we’d need to build such a machine. But you sounded pretty pessimistic about our current social science. (I’m making no claim one way or the other about our current social science, just trying to draw out tensions between different parts of your piece.)
You’re right the conclusion is quite underspecified—how exactly do we build such a cooperation machine?
I don’t know yet, but my bet is more on engineering, product design, and infrastructure than on social science. More like building a better Reddit or Uber (or supporting infrastructure layers like WWW and the Internet) than like writing papers.
Okay, I see better now where you’re coming from and how you’re thinking that social science could be hopeless and yet we can still build a cooperation machine. I still suspect you’ll need some innovations in social science to implement such a machine. Even if we assume that we have a black box machine that does what you say, you still have to be sure that people will use the machine, so you’ll need enough understanding of social science to either predict that they will, or somehow get them to.
But even if you solve the problem of implementation, I suspect you’ll need innovations in social science in order to even design such a machine. In order to understand what kind of technology or infrastructure would increase trust, asabiyah, etc, you need to understand people. And maybe you think the understanding we already have of people with our current social science is already enough to tell us what we’d need to build such a machine. But you sounded pretty pessimistic about our current social science. (I’m making no claim one way or the other about our current social science, just trying to draw out tensions between different parts of your piece.)