I have a bunch of thoughts on this. A lot of the good effects of this actually happened in space-law, because nobody really cared about the effects of the laws when they were written.
Other interesting contracts that were surprisingly long-lasting is the ownership of Hong-Kong for Britain, which was returned after 90 years.
However, I think there are various problems with doing this a lot. One of them is that when you make a policy decision that’s supposed to be useful in 20 years, then you are making a bid on that policy being useful in the environment that will exist in 20 years, over which you have a lot of uncertainty. So by default I expect policy-decisions made for a world 20 years from now to be worse than decisions made for the current world.
The enforcability of contracts over such long time periods is also quite unclear. What prevents the leadership 15 years from now from just calling off the policy implementation? This requires a lot of trust and support for the meta-system, which is hard to sustain over such long periods of time.
In general, I have a perspective that lots of problems could be solved if people could reliably make long-term contracts, but that there are no reliably enforcement mechanisms for long-term contracts at the national-actor level.
I think lack of long-term contract enforcement is one part of it—the US congress routinely passes laws with immediate costs and delayed revenue, and then either continually postpones or changes it’s mind on the delayed part (while keeping the immediate part). I’d classify it as much as deception as of lack of enforcement. It’s compounded by the fact that the composition of the government changes a bit every 2 years, but the fundamental problem is that “enforcement” is necessary, because “alignment” doesn’t exist.
Trying to go meta and enforce far-mode stated values rather than honoring near-mode actual behaviors is effectively forcing people into doing what they say they want, as opposed to inferring what they actually want. I’m actually sympathetic to that tactic, but I do recognize that it’s coercion (enforcement of ill-considered contract) rather than actual agreement (where people do what they want, because that’s what they want).
I have a bunch of thoughts on this. A lot of the good effects of this actually happened in space-law, because nobody really cared about the effects of the laws when they were written.
Other interesting contracts that were surprisingly long-lasting is the ownership of Hong-Kong for Britain, which was returned after 90 years.
However, I think there are various problems with doing this a lot. One of them is that when you make a policy decision that’s supposed to be useful in 20 years, then you are making a bid on that policy being useful in the environment that will exist in 20 years, over which you have a lot of uncertainty. So by default I expect policy-decisions made for a world 20 years from now to be worse than decisions made for the current world.
The enforcability of contracts over such long time periods is also quite unclear. What prevents the leadership 15 years from now from just calling off the policy implementation? This requires a lot of trust and support for the meta-system, which is hard to sustain over such long periods of time.
In general, I have a perspective that lots of problems could be solved if people could reliably make long-term contracts, but that there are no reliably enforcement mechanisms for long-term contracts at the national-actor level.
I think lack of long-term contract enforcement is one part of it—the US congress routinely passes laws with immediate costs and delayed revenue, and then either continually postpones or changes it’s mind on the delayed part (while keeping the immediate part). I’d classify it as much as deception as of lack of enforcement. It’s compounded by the fact that the composition of the government changes a bit every 2 years, but the fundamental problem is that “enforcement” is necessary, because “alignment” doesn’t exist.
Trying to go meta and enforce far-mode stated values rather than honoring near-mode actual behaviors is effectively forcing people into doing what they say they want, as opposed to inferring what they actually want. I’m actually sympathetic to that tactic, but I do recognize that it’s coercion (enforcement of ill-considered contract) rather than actual agreement (where people do what they want, because that’s what they want).
Good example: the US tried to go metric and then canceled its commitment.