I can’t help but think a lot of this stuff is caused by an ontology mismatch. People encounter dynamics where they feel stuck or harmed, and they want there to be norms that prevent those dynamics, but norms operate on the level of behavior, which is typically too adaptable and nuanced to really be the source of the problems people encounter. You basically have to directly manage your community on the basis of traits that create patterns of behavior, rather than on the basis of the behavior itself. But this requires a comprehensive ontology of harm-relevant traits to make decisions on the basis of.
(This is related to the fact that Bayesian inference fails if you lack the grain of truth/realizability assumption. If your prior assumes some people Are Bad but that’s not really how people differ, then your probability estimates for whether someone Is Bad are not gonna converge based on evidence.)
This sort of ontology is usually constructed in a messy way that tends to be pretty controversial among rationalists, and it tends to be communicated very poorly, which tends to make it hard to apply it in practice because every part is going to recursively seem wrong.
I think I know better (or at least, more rationalist-compatible) ways to construct and communicate such ontologies, but I have a hard time finding people who are interested in committing a lot of work to testing it with me, and also I’ve been persuaded that this isn’t the only problem and that there are other problems too, including some of what you stated in the article. In addition to the ontology mismatch issue, two of the problems that I think are most significant are 1) lack of information, 2) corruption of justice processes.
Problems 1 and 2 seem worsened a lot by applying it to conflict rather than to other subjects, so I’m inclined to give up advertising my method for justice processes. Still, if anyone wants to give it a go and is willing to commit a ton of work into it from their community, please reach out to me.
I wouldn’t mind in principle, but it is extremely compressed, and kind of stitched together. As in, while I have examples of individual bits and pieces of my claims, I don’t have any examples that go end-to-end. Instead I derived bits of the theory from the different examples and then stuck those theory-bits together into an overall framework.
So basically I can zoom in on different bits but I don’t have time to zoom in on it all at once. (I am working writing it all up at once, but that’s not ready yet. Partly I’m also delaying because I prefer searching for examples that go end-to-end and because I’m still learning new nuances and techniques.)
I can’t help but think a lot of this stuff is caused by an ontology mismatch. People encounter dynamics where they feel stuck or harmed, and they want there to be norms that prevent those dynamics, but norms operate on the level of behavior, which is typically too adaptable and nuanced to really be the source of the problems people encounter. You basically have to directly manage your community on the basis of traits that create patterns of behavior, rather than on the basis of the behavior itself. But this requires a comprehensive ontology of harm-relevant traits to make decisions on the basis of.
(This is related to the fact that Bayesian inference fails if you lack the grain of truth/realizability assumption. If your prior assumes some people Are Bad but that’s not really how people differ, then your probability estimates for whether someone Is Bad are not gonna converge based on evidence.)
This sort of ontology is usually constructed in a messy way that tends to be pretty controversial among rationalists, and it tends to be communicated very poorly, which tends to make it hard to apply it in practice because every part is going to recursively seem wrong.
I think I know better (or at least, more rationalist-compatible) ways to construct and communicate such ontologies, but I have a hard time finding people who are interested in committing a lot of work to testing it with me, and also I’ve been persuaded that this isn’t the only problem and that there are other problems too, including some of what you stated in the article. In addition to the ontology mismatch issue, two of the problems that I think are most significant are 1) lack of information, 2) corruption of justice processes.
Problems 1 and 2 seem worsened a lot by applying it to conflict rather than to other subjects, so I’m inclined to give up advertising my method for justice processes. Still, if anyone wants to give it a go and is willing to commit a ton of work into it from their community, please reach out to me.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say—would you mind trying to illustrate what you mean?
I wouldn’t mind in principle, but it is extremely compressed, and kind of stitched together. As in, while I have examples of individual bits and pieces of my claims, I don’t have any examples that go end-to-end. Instead I derived bits of the theory from the different examples and then stuck those theory-bits together into an overall framework.
So basically I can zoom in on different bits but I don’t have time to zoom in on it all at once. (I am working writing it all up at once, but that’s not ready yet. Partly I’m also delaying because I prefer searching for examples that go end-to-end and because I’m still learning new nuances and techniques.)