This post builds on much of what Sahil has already written about in his Live Theory sequence, though it approaches things from a slightly different direction. It comes from a broader body of work exploring systems of governance and law that I am working on as part of the High Actuation Spaces project. Thank you to all who have supported my work over the past couple of years, with special shoutouts to Sahil, Matt and TJ. And many thanks to Blake, whose generosity helped me devote myself more fully to this work.

PS: I’m always happy to chat governance, so please reach out if you have an interest in what I’ve discussed here. I’d be particularly excited to talk with anyone who has interest/expertise in the common law and its intersection with philosophy of mind.

Note: I use ‘theory’ throughout as a broad catchall that extends beyond the usual definition of the word.

The problem with ‘dead’ theories

Distributability vs co-creatability

Conventional conceptions of ‘theories’ (very broadly defined as the conceptual tools we use to make sense of and explain the world) are devoid of their own life – they rely on human users as the only source of intelligence to put them into action. These ‘dead’ theories seek to uncover and convey universal principles that apply across contexts. Insights are imbued into static, generalisable artefacts and distributed for mass consumption. This approach allows for theories to be consistently applied and widely distributed. However, it also means their generalisability is contingent upon the erasure of context-specific detail. I like to think of this as a trade-off between co-creatability and distributability.

Theories that embed local insight, for example, rules of thumb or social customs, are highly co-creatable as they depend significantly on the collective input of local actors for their construction. However, they are also inaccessible to outsiders and, thus, not easily distributable. As a result, their scope of coordination is limited to a specific, locally-defined context.

Efforts to coordinate at a larger scale often involve replacing local theories with universally applicable ones – rules of thumb with formal scientific proofs or social customs with legal codes. These universal theories make insights highly distributable. However, they also reduce the scope for the people who use them to contribute to their construction. Whe...

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