I hadn’t thought of the “Schelling Fences” article, even though I’d thought of Schelling points as being related when I thought about better names. Good catch. Other related articles are probably Defecting by Accident—A Flaw Common to Analytical People and Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate . If “rationalists should win” then “rationalists in a group should win more dramatically” and this is a process that is central to group coordination.
I really like the idea of having a concept or a name for rational astrologies, but I think the name itself could use some work. A more technical sounding term (more likely to be taken up and used as a difficult-to-inflate keyword in academic research) for the body of beliefs and practices that the original article called a “rationalist astrology” might be a “Faith Insuring Schelling Simplification”. I think that covers all the key features: the way a sort of “protective put” is offered to people who “really believe” (or comprehensively pretend to believe) in a theory that is too simple to be technically literally correct but that will be intelligible to many people as affording “the right enough behavior that we can coordinate to bring it about without talking about it too much”.
As near as I can tell, issues like inferential distances and dunbar’s number mean that for any large group of people to coordinate effectively they will need to have something like a chain of command, or they will need a set of faith insuring schelling simplifications backed by real social capital, or they will need both. A naive prediction is that a really useful FISS would be a theory that affords functional chain-of-command-like behavior. Another interesting angle is that, if you squint, you can probably see that some people might see the whole thing for what it is (falsity and manipulation and all) and yet still believe that the essence of pragmatic morality is supporting their community’s FISS set.
Also related : Schelling Fences and self-fulfilling correlations/prophecies.
I hadn’t thought of the “Schelling Fences” article, even though I’d thought of Schelling points as being related when I thought about better names. Good catch. Other related articles are probably Defecting by Accident—A Flaw Common to Analytical People and Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate . If “rationalists should win” then “rationalists in a group should win more dramatically” and this is a process that is central to group coordination.
I really like the idea of having a concept or a name for rational astrologies, but I think the name itself could use some work. A more technical sounding term (more likely to be taken up and used as a difficult-to-inflate keyword in academic research) for the body of beliefs and practices that the original article called a “rationalist astrology” might be a “Faith Insuring Schelling Simplification”. I think that covers all the key features: the way a sort of “protective put” is offered to people who “really believe” (or comprehensively pretend to believe) in a theory that is too simple to be technically literally correct but that will be intelligible to many people as affording “the right enough behavior that we can coordinate to bring it about without talking about it too much”.
As near as I can tell, issues like inferential distances and dunbar’s number mean that for any large group of people to coordinate effectively they will need to have something like a chain of command, or they will need a set of faith insuring schelling simplifications backed by real social capital, or they will need both. A naive prediction is that a really useful FISS would be a theory that affords functional chain-of-command-like behavior. Another interesting angle is that, if you squint, you can probably see that some people might see the whole thing for what it is (falsity and manipulation and all) and yet still believe that the essence of pragmatic morality is supporting their community’s FISS set.