Re: Soft Law. Today, I agree it is mostly wordcel bullshit.
But in the 1950s and 1960s? Quite influential, especially with US + friends, even without the threat of 'bombs.' Many of the moral and legal norms on bioethics are the downstream result of soft-law promulgated in the postwar period.
To get in this headspace, think of a UN resolution taking up space in the major national newspaper for several weeks, or even months. A world where single books and conferences routinely defined the future of fields and movements (e.g. Silent Spring) because of its relative media undersaturation.
Very helpful. If you are interested in adding a section about other countries/regions, I have done some research on various regulatory regimes (mainly in Europe). Happy to share.
I think this might explain the difference in framing? From the quote below, I assumed you were trying to come up with a fully general solution to the problem you specify:
What I think Wat Do is, figure out how to build a political network that is powerful enough to have leverage, but, is still based on a solid foundation of epistemic trust.
But I see now that you were taking the existence of a community of sane, reasonable, and mostly value-aligned participants as a given, and instead focusing on a framework which could make their interaction with the wider political process saner.
The uncharitable reading is that you are assuming a can opener, but, from reading your other writing, evidently the better reading is that you do have a model for producing/widening this community elsewhere (inter alia).
Have you ever read Tocqueville's "Democracy in America"? You can have as many checks and balances and clever system frameworks as you want, but at some point you just need people to believe in democracy. That is to say, your model of good government is never going to be complete without some kind of model of culture and shared values.
Maybe talking about culture - which is fuzzy, historical, symbolic, and social - is outside your wheelhouse. So what? Maybe clever system design and creating good incentive structures is outside my competency - that doesn't mean I can create meaningful political change by writing fiction alone or going to rallies. Don't fall into the failure mode of: 'to the hammer everything looks like a nail.'
To concretise this, consider your proposal "Have private evaluator people who check in on whether candidates seem good, and whether the whole political bloc seems sane."
Who watches the watchmen? Who ensures they are sane and good? No-one, it can't be checks-and-balances all the way down: at some point you just need to trust experts will have high integrity and aligned values. Not everyone can be elected, not everyone can be hired by a market process, not everyone can be monitored all the time, an objective bureaucratic examination can never filter for everything you want in a leader.
Does that mean your proposals are wrong or unhelpful? No, they seem well thought-out and plausible. It is merely to say your world-model seems to be missing a few gears.
1Some points:
1. "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Brevity & elegance =/= low-effort.
2. Footnotes/endnotes, collapsable boxes, and appendices exist for a reason. Good writing succinctly conveys an idea and withstands deeper scrutiny. The internet is not paper.
3. Often a few in-depth reads > a million skims. Small group dynamics are potent - e.g., NrX and Mencius Moldbug, or early Tumblr. True for both development of ideas & influence.
4. "You will never have any control over what random people find interesting, what the algorithms decide to promote, or anything at all about other people." Literally false:
- Somebody has nontrivial technical & regulatory control over what an algorithm promotes. Algorithms are not natural processes. It is possible to become this 'somebody' or reason with them.
- The citizen has varying control over social technology & media via the political process. Unless you really mean "you should never have any control..." But do you mean this?
- Taste-makers and trend-setters exist. Likewise content aggregators, traditional media gatekeepers, and advertisers. Listen to them speak in private, do they feel powerless? And they listen to criticism.
Arguing specific actors should be accountable for the sanity of online culture is reasonable and realistic. Online writers are allowed to join in too.
The practical solution that medieval courts arrived at, and later the British and American admiralty, was the ship itself does.
This is not false, but unhelpfully misleading when compared to corporations. The medieval reference is presumably referring to deodand law, which has little to do legal personhood in the sense most people are interested in.
The description of the legal personification of the vessel is accurate, but it can hardly be said that ships are 'accorded the rank of person' analogously to a corporation.
That said, if we are going with the broad, non-technical use of the word 'person', an interesting case is the trial of animals.
If it is of interest, I carried out a highly informal reddit survey on the birthrate in the context of Scotland's TFR being below that of Japan (with a summary here).
A common reason for not having children was the cost in terms of health, time, stress, freedom to travel, plan holidays, and move house. These are mostly invariant with income (unless you can afford a full-time nanny) and are the natural product of "good parenting" norms/obligations.
(which, it should be noted, are often reasonable: I think being a good parent does require spending a lot - more than any usual lifestyle activity - of time on your children; the kind of emotional investment which can lead to stress or pain; and a degree of stability/commitment which precludes the free-wheeling lifestyle of a single or DINK).
I am guessing that many modern people rate these intangible costs quite highly and the amount needed to pay them to accept the tradeoffs is therefore very high.
This is fun (although endless, especially if we include things related to deliberate/semi-deliberate signalling), here are a few:
(1) Hobby-related examples. Callouses on the palm in the spot where fingers connect to hand (e.g. like weightlifting callouses) , and on the thumb (on the side facing towards the other fingers), is quite commonly due to rowing. E.g., the friction of the oar rotating around the fingers and thumb holding it. Crooked nose sometimes indicates repeated breaking - high contact sports or plain fighting most common. From experience, boxing is quite common due to the artificially frequent number of blows to the face. Can combine this with scars on the knuckles, or slightly puffy knuckles & poor motor control from repeated mini-fractures to indicate a serious fighter. But how useful is knowing someone's hobby? Often they'll just tell you right away...
(2) How about health conditions? This one is pretty useful and seems reasonably study-able (ofc not to become some unofficial doctor, just to make informed guesses). E.g., a CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitoring) in the arm for type-1 & II diabetics, ridges in the nails indicating possible zinc or iron deficiency, eye-bags for sleep deprivation; serious sun ageing on one side of the face for a possible long-haul driver; yellowing of skin for liver failure etc. And then all the obvious prosthetics, glasses, hearing aids, support dogs, dark glasses &c.
Notably, health conditions (if correctly diagnosed) often indicate lifestyle and occupation, and this is likely behind many of the observations of the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, surgeon Joseph Bell.
(3) Similarly what about nationality? Again, often informative and extremely useful in countries with...er... history. Paying attention to different accents would be a simple method, as would accumulating basic knowledge of geography and typical travel patterns. Knowing, for instance, that Russians travel to Turkey in large numbers, or Kurds to Nashville, means you could probably make pretty good guesses as to a person's nationality even if you were not confident on different slavic/middle eastern languages.
(4) You mention clothing (red-bottomed shoes?) but this seems like a bottomless pit of data. You can gather lots of information from attire about: nationality (how easy is it to spot a tourist?) and religion (knowing the difference between the burkha, hijab, niqab, chador; happening to know most protestants rarely carry crosses on a chain; rastafarians; orthodox jews in various stages of training); occupation (looking at you, painter decorators); health (orthopedic shoes); class (in the UK traditionally, the flatcap, now, the shellsuit; quite a subtle exercise, and often region-dependent); age.
I suspect since the 19th century clothing is now less useful due to the slow breakdown of class and gender markers (and general trend towards bland causalwear internationally). The stratification and diversity of clothing was notably far more noticeable in Holmes's time (as was, perhaps, national differences). Note how many of his deductions use general patterns from a 'social role.'
Side-note: I am also not sure if I believe that learning more facts 'pushes out' others (the 'cluttered mind' idea), the main issue is opportunity cost. Watching lots of sitcoms hasn't made it hard to learn new things because I can't stop thinking of 'the one where Ross murders a child', but watcing tv was certainly time not-studying...
I find the tone or vibe of this essay fluctuates. Sometimes the tone is 'powerful AI is coming and we better make sure it wants to do the right kind of philosophy', which imo seems incredibly fraught. The world where the manipulation example is a live problem is absurdly dangerous.
Other times - especially in section 3, I get the vibe that philosophy is less relevant than not building strong AI in the first place (limiting the extent of optimization, or keeping AI as a tool, or confined to local contexts &c).
The effect is disconcerting. I think I am confused because the background model of AI progress is missing. I.e: do you think a pause is ideal but impossible, so this is the next best thing?