A long reflection requires new institutions, and creating new institutions requires individual agency. Right?
Seems like there’s already enough people in the world with naturally high individual agency that (if time wasn’t an issue) you could build the necessary institutions by convincing them to work in that direction.
I have trouble imagining a long reflection actually happening in a world with the individual agency level dialed down.
Yeah if the dial down happened before good institutions were built for the long reflection, that could be bad, but also seems relatively easy to avoid (don’t start trying to dial down individual agency before building the institutions).
I feel better about cultivating agency in people who are intelligent and wise rather than people who are not.
Yeah that seems better to me too. But this made me think of another consideration:
if individual agency (in general, or the specific kind you’re trying to cultivate) is in fact dangerous, there may also be a selection effect in the opposite direction, where the wise intuitively shy away from being cultivated (without necessarily being able to articulate why).
Seems like there’s already enough people in the world with naturally high individual agency that (if time wasn’t an issue) you could build the necessary institutions by convincing them to work in that direction.
Yeah if the dial down happened before good institutions were built for the long reflection, that could be bad, but also seems relatively easy to avoid (don’t start trying to dial down individual agency before building the institutions).
Yeah that seems better to me too. But this made me think of another consideration: if individual agency (in general, or the specific kind you’re trying to cultivate) is in fact dangerous, there may also be a selection effect in the opposite direction, where the wise intuitively shy away from being cultivated (without necessarily being able to articulate why).