This is crazy because people need to work to survive and what if their only options are people who are trying to take advantage? I get that. It’s not a practical proposal.
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But all the actual productive capacity of the economy is in people who are making positive-sum contributions. The “nation” of positive-sum builders and helpers is, by necessity, richer than the “nation” of zero-sum takers. In actual resources if not dollars.
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Imagine if everyone went on a sort of “strike” all at once: don’t work with or for anyone you think is sleazy or unfair. Don’t do any job you think is pointless or immoral. Just actually listen to your personal judgment. Would everyone starve?
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If people are even sort of okay at correctly recognizing who is a helpful, reasonable contributor and who is a sneak or bully or freeloader, then *no*, we wouldn’t starve, we’d be much better off!
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If a vital industry to people’s survival were so full of assholes that it would fall apart under this “strike”, then it probably wasn’t very efficient to begin with, and some helpful competent person would organize a relief effort to fill immediate needs and grow from there.
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If people in this “strike” ostracize the people who are vital to keeping them alive, they are going to have a bad time. If people ostracize those who are actually taking advantage of them, they’re going to do better than ever.
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In other words: a world in which people use their own judgment of character is a world in which people prosper or suffer according to how well their judgment corresponds to survival value. People who make this a “popularity contest” will lose hard.
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There’s a weirdly compelling intuition to me that the only real problem with the world is people second-guessing their own best judgments. Disagreement isn’t a problem, conflicting interests aren’t a problem, ignorance isn’t a problem; those are all necessary conditions of life.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
what makes the domain of personal judgments different from other epistemic domains that this would be true? it seems like in other areas it’s often correct to favor consensus over personal judgment (eg vaccination)
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Replying to @browserdotsys
choosing to defer to consensus where you think that's best is *also* a personal judgment.
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but also: if human minds are good at *anything* it's social judgments. We are heavily optimized for that.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
social judgments are also subject to a lot of well known, systematic biases and failure modes too though (although I guess this cuts both ways, since it means consensus may also be systematically biased)
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