My political/economic philosophy priors:
1. No rule about political/economic systems is completely accurate or universal
2. In general, emergent phenomenon from low-level agents is better than top-down rules
3. Culture has huge impact, and often determines the success of a system
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re: 1; political philosophies have a flaw somewhere. e.g., I'm libertarianish, but libertarianism philosophy is imperfect; philosophies are built on assumptions around things like 'rights' or 'freedom' or 'safety', which are arbitrary and socially flexible.
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re: 2; emergent phenomenon leads to better stability and a more complex and vibrant being; see what systems arise naturally out of watching people pursue what they need, and will often be way more nuanced and detailed in the right ways than planned laws can be.
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re: 3; debating if communism/anarchy/capitalism is best leaves out the incredible importance of the culture of the people in this system. The system and the culture work in tandem as one being; you can't separate them. A system might thrive with one culture but fail with another.
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The problem with (2) is that emergent phenomena are often *horrible* nash equilibria.
Consider, for example, the phenomenon of rape. It's clearly an emergent phenomenon because of how evolution works. But it's horrible, everyone would be better off if it didn't exist.
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As with rule 1; no rule is perfect, and I agree that going with emergent phenomenon sometimes results in bad things (though overall, less bad than top-down planning).
I do think the rape example is pretty oversimplified though.
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Can you expand on #2? Is this a way of saying you prefer something like democracy over monarchy?
It seems top down rules create emergent phenomena, and that they are also a phenomenon that emerge from lower level behavior of agents, so I have trouble viewing as a dichotomy.
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right; it's unclear at what point we count top-down behavior as emergent phenomenon. I want another word or spectrum to describe self-modifying behavior so I can be more precise about it; but it seems to be some sort of sliding scale and too far in self-modifying seems bad
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Doesn't 1 + 3 contradict 2?
Either societies work by general principle (e.g. more personal agency = generally better) or else they're super particular/contextual and the same principle in one society can completely fail in another, meaning there is no general principle?
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