1 sat \ 9 replies \ @Undisciplined 26 Jul 2023 \ on: "I" vs "we" from an economic perspective bitcoin
Very short answer that I think gets to the heart of your premise:
Birds flock because it's good for the survival of each bird in it. The flock itself does not have preferences or agency or independent value.
It's a matter of perspective whether the flock, or the school, or the anthill, or the human being, is real; or if only its constituent elements are real. Certainly the survival value of the individual, in these cases, is related to dynamics only real at the level of the aggregate.
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Not exactly. Animal behaviors can generally be explained from the standpoint of passing on genes, as if that's the individual's motivation. The same can't be said for collectives behaving to propagate the collective beyond that, at least not in any work I'm familiar with.
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The unit of transmission is the gene when you're talking strictly biology. We're now talking about other abstractions. Dawkins introduced the term "universal Darwinism" to discuss this strategy on non-biological strata.
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I see that something I wrote was pretty unclear.
What I meant by
Animal behaviors can generally be explained from the standpoint of passing on genes
was that even the emergence of collectives can be explained by that kind of rational self interest. The implication being that there isn't really any room left for the collective to express any agency.
In other words, what is it these collectives are doing? What preferences or actions are they expressing?
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That doesn't mean it necessarily applies to human collectives. Broadly speaking, social outcomes conform to individual incentives. That's different than thinking about the collectives of cells that make up individuals.
What complicates the picture slightly is the feedback that develops over generations of living in groups. Over time, behaviors that are better adapted to surviving in the group are selected for, which can make it seem like the group itself is maintaining itself.
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Indeed. The evolutionary game theory on that latter point is super interesting.
But I think you're missing the essence of this, which is that even though the individual units are the ones that have "agency" (I use scare quotes because it's not obvious what this actually means, as per modern phenomenological cognitive science, or how and under what circumstances one arrives at agency built from non-agentic components), the fact that a person can't identify the agency operating at the level of emergence -- in this case, the human collection which is constituted of individual agents -- does not mean that no such agency exists. Rather, it exists at another layer of the substrate. The field of complexity science exists in part to pursue this idea.
Although tbf, I'm not sure this thread is necessary to the question I was originally asking or not. My original point was that, regardless of what a person feels about intentionality on emergent structures, there's a thing I can't quite believe, which is that people in this space really mean it when they think that everything will come out fine basically ignoring the social layer, that individual-layer incentives and property rights and sound money are all that's necessary for a golden age to ensue, and that larger-scale coordination issues just work themselves out with no "we" needing to be taken into account.
Obviously, people make claims of this type. I'm trying to get a sense of how much they (at least the ones who reply to this post) mean it, and why, and if there's anything to learn from it.
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there's a thing I can't quite believe, which is that people in this space really mean it when they think that everything will come out fine basically ignoring the social layer, that individual-layer incentives and property rights and sound money are all that's necessary
Believe it baby! Some of us do believe in the emergent order of consensual behavior. That doesn't mean we have no concern for the social layer. Rather, it means we believe the social layer emerges from the incentives inherent in a commitment to a non-coercive social order.
It isn't that surprising when you think about how a commitment to property rights inherently means some form of a commitment to mutual protection from harm. At some level, there would have to be mutually agreed to terms. That implies people who seek to live coercive lifestyles have to be somehow removed. If there's no one around doing coercive stuff, what's the big concern about the "social layer"?
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Mainly, I don't think it's enough. It's never been enough, anywhere, ever -- more structure always emerges. You have property rights, sound money, etc., and then your neighbor starts doing something that pisses you off that is not exactly coercive, but out-of-bounds. Everyone around you agrees that there's something wrong with this asshole. And social structure emerges. Somebody winds up 'coercing' somebody else in the end.
Keynes and Hayek had an exchange after H published "The Road to Serfdom" where Keynes basically said (paraphrasing): "I am totally on board with this, it's great, except: how are you going to realize it in practice? What, literally, are you going to do?" Which I think is telling. If you have to get really concrete about what to do in realistic circumstances, the simplistic things fall away.
But this, or something like it, has been litigated since Plato, and we're not going to resolve it on SN. I appreciate you riffing with me a bit on the topic, it is more real than random Twitter drive-bys, and helps me get perspective.
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Same. It was a fun little chat.
Btw,
more structure always emerges
is exactly the relevant concern. Maybe we are too optimistic in thinking a society can ward off the emergence of a coercive structure by building out sufficient voluntary structures. We're a long way from a world where that's relevant, though.