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The confusion here is in the word "cost". In the context of lsusr's post, costs and cheapness are framed in terms of monetary costs and cheapness, yet I ask: why not consider moral costs as real, decision-critical costs? Then seek to reduce all decision-critical costs, whether moral, instrumental, or otherwise.
I want to DM about rationality. Direct messaging is not subject to so many incentive pressures. Please DM me. Please let me be free.
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I'm looking for someone who I can share my half-baked rambly thoughts with. Shortform makes me feel terrible.
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When a bailey is actually true, there are better ways to show it - in those cases they ARE in the motte.
Endorsed.
Just because there are mottes and baileys, doesn't mean the baileys are wrong; they may just be less defensible in everyday non-ideal speech situations.
To whatever extent culture must pass through biology (e.g. retinas, eardrums, stomach) before having an effect on a person, and to whatever extent culture is invented through biological means, cultural inputs are entirely compatible with biological determinism.
Recently an acquaintance told me we had to be leaving at "4:00 PM sharp."
Knowing of the planning fallacy, I asked "Sharp? Uh-oh. As a primate animal, I naturally tend not to be very good with sharp deadlines, though your information is useful. Could you tell me when we're leaving smooth?"
"Smooth? What do you mean?"
"Smooth as opposed to sharp. Like, suppose you told me the time I should be aiming to be ready for in order to compensate for the fact that humans are bad at estimating time costs. Let's say you wanted to create a significant buffer between the time I was ready and the time I had to be ready by; the beginning of that significant buffer is the time we're leaving by smooth."
Since then, we've been saying things in the structure "X smooth, Y sharp", where X and Y are times or amounts of time. It's intuitive, catchy, simple, and very useful.
I don't take it for granted that saying something very beautiful but doing something contradictorily ugly and cynicism-inducing is less insane, nor, if it is necessarily sane, do I take it for granted that sanity is the thing we should be striving for in that case.
These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive; talking is a thing that people do. The correct answer is that it's the latter case (verbal theory) as an instance of the former category of cases (cases where people copy the behavior of others, such as fashions of thinking and talking).
I'm also not very sure that removing the ability to negotiate theories of objectivity or fairness, which are naturally controversial subjects, would make people more peaceful on average given it as a limiting condition on the deveopment of culture starting with the first appearance of any human communication; I expect it would make world histories more violent on average to remove such an ability.
What is normally called common sense is not common sense. Common sense is the sense that is actually common. Idealized common sense (which, I shall elaborate, is the union of the set of thoughts you would have to be carefully trying to be common-sensical in order make salient in your mind and the set of natural common sense thoughts) should be called something other than common sense, because making a wide-sweeping mental search about possible ways of being common-sensical is not common, even if a general deference and post-hoc accountability to the concept of common sense may be common.
In this shortform, I want to introduce a concept of government structure I've been thinking of called representative omnilateralism. I do not know if this system works and I do not claim that it does. I'm asking for imagination here.
Representative (subagent) omnilateralism: A system under which one person or a groups of people tries to reconcile the interests of all people(/subagents) in a nation (instead of just the majority of the nation) into one plan that satisfies all people(/subagents)*
I think "representative democracy" is an ambiguous term which can be used to mean some mix of representative ochlocracy or representative omnilateralism whenever the situation is convenient. The reason we like democracy is because it approximates direct omnilateralism better than other alternatives, but if we will permit *representative* democracy, why not representative omnilateralism? Much as direct democracy is a purer ochlocracy in theory, representative omnilateralism is a purer elitism and a purer defense of the less fortunate in theory, but direct omnilateralism literally has the best of all worlds.
My impression (not verdict) is that direct omnilateralism is impossible in practice only because people are not equipped to negotiate optimally. If everyone was better at negotiating, we would have way fewer conflicts and far more business.
*(I mention subagents because people often do not accept parts of themselves which are innocent, which is a personal mistake as well as a commons mistake; direct subagent omnilateralism is an even higher aspiration than direct superagent omnilateralism)