[ExI] Under the libertarian yoke was Re: Next Decade May See No Warming

[Damien Sullivan]

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 04:11:02PM +0930, Emlyn wrote:
> 2008/5/3 Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>:

> > Knowing all this, I and everyone else would *willingly* agree to be
> > compelled to cooperate. Collectivist anarchism might allow for such
> > cooperation while free market anarchism would not. If the advanced
> > aliens are all libertarians this may explain the Fermi Paradox.
> 
> Interestingly, the major commercial players in markets sometimes
> behave in the "superrational" manner, working towards and welcome
> regulation - ie: externally imposed restrictions. The great example of

I think that would just be rational, not Hofstadter's superrationality.
The latter is when you agree to the thing not in your immediate
self-interest, with no actual enforcement of that, in the expectation
that the other person will follow your thinking and do likewise.  It
sounds nice but I've never really bought it.  Agreeing to regulation is
agreeing to enforcement of a global standard, bringing things into
rationality.  (And the agreement itself can be rational, if the agree-er
is avoiding harsher regulation, or has non-market values the regulation
will protect.)

Maybe second-order rational, like committing to be irrational for game
theoretic reasons, but it still makes direct sense without weird
symmetry operations, which I suspect would only work well when the two
parties share a history, e.g. I can trust the other to be superrational
because we have common knowledge of having altered ourselves to be
superrational, and can thus trust each other even without future
interaction.  Or, more biologically, because we're clones.

-xx- Damien X-)