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

[Emlyn]

2008/5/7 Damien Sullivan <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu>:
> 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.

Thanks for that, I was just parrotting the word superrational without
knowing its actual meaning. In fact, I meant something in quite strong
contrast to superrational; it's the fact that there is no
superrationality that drives this line of thinking.

And of course, non-enforced standards can achieve the same thing in
some situations, without regulation, simply because of the positive
network effects that can flow from a shared standard, best I guess in
situations where gradual adoption gradually increases the usefulness
of the standard, and where defection doesn't give a significant
benefit.

> 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.)

Or if the agree-er simply sees that the total value of the market will
be vastly improved by regulation, predicting that will benefit them
far more than any losses from the direct imposition on them of the
regulation.

>
> 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-)


-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com