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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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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.

10:48 PM · Nov 25, 2019

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Rape, cancer, malaria (parasites in general), cheating, organised crime, war, female genital mutilation, slavery .... Emergent phenomena in groups of agents are generically awful because of how game theory works.

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(And if you believe otherwise you have a very serious mistake in your worldview)

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It's just an example of a phenomenon that emerges and is bad. Parasites of various kinds are other examples.

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Even that's underestimating it because top-down planners work to fix road networks in Europe You really want to look at roads in very poor developing countries to see just how bad emergent can be.