[Excerpted from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/24/the-invisible-nation-reconciling-utilitarianism-and-contractualism/]
Imagine the Economists’ Paradise.
In the Economists’ Paradise, all transactions are voluntary and honest. All game-theoretic problems are solved. All Pareto improvements get made. All Kaldor-Hicks improvements get converted into Pareto improvements by distributing appropriate compensation, and then get made. In all cases where people could gain by cooperating, they cooperate. In all tragedies of the commons, everyone agrees to share the commons according to some reasonable plan. Nobody uses force, everyone keeps their agreements. Multipolar traps turn to gardens, Moloch is defeated for all time.
The Economists’ Paradise is stronger than the Libertarians’ Paradise, which is just a place where no one initiates force and all economic transactions are legal, because the Libertarians’ Paradise might still have a bunch of Prisoner’s Dilemmas and the Economists’ Paradise wouldn’t. But it is weaker than Utilitarians’ Paradise, because people with more power and money still get more of the eventual utility.
From a god’s-eye view, it seems relatively easy to create the Economists’ Paradise. It might be hard to figure out how to solve game theoretic problems in absolutely ideal ways, but it’s often very easy to figure out how to solve them in a much better way than the uncoordinated participants are doing right now.
A coin flip is the epitome of unintelligent problem solving, but flipping coins to decide which Islands go to Japan or China still beats having World War III, by a large margin.
Now imagine…
In a dream, your soul goes to Economists’ Paradise and agrees on the perfect patchwork of maxims with all the other souls there. But as dawn approaches, you realize when you awaken you will never remember all of what you agreed upon, and even worse, all the other souls there are going to wake up and not remember what they agreed upon either. So all of you together frantically try to compress your wisdom into a couple of sentences that the waking mind will be able to recall and follow, and you end up with platitudes like “Use your intuitive sense of niceness” and “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and “try to maximize utility” and “anybody who treats you badly, assume they’re not in on the deal and feel free to treat them badly too, but not so badly that you feel like you can murder them or something.”
A particularly good platitude/compression might be “Work very hard to cultivate the mysterious skill of figuring out what people in the Economists’ Paradise would agree to, then do those things.” If you’re Greek, you can even compress it into a single word: phronesis.
There is an Invisible Nation. It is not a democracy, per se, but it is something of a republic, where each of us is represented by a wiser, stronger version of ourselves who fights for our preferences to be enacted into law. Its legislature is untainted by partisanship, perfectly efficient, incorruptible, without greed, without tyranny. Its bylaws are the laws of mathematics; its Capitol Building stands at the center of Platonia.
All good people are patriots of the Invisible Nation. All the visible nations of the world – America, Canada, Russia – are properly understood to be its provinces, tasked with executing its laws as best they can, and with proper consideration to the unique needs of the local populace. Some provinces are more loyal than others. Some seem to be in outright rebellion. The laws of the Invisible Nation contain provisions about what to do with provinces in rebellion, but they are vague and difficult to interpret, and its patriots can disagree on what they are.
Maybe one day we will create a superintelligence that tries something like Coherent Extrapolated Volition – which I think we have just rederived, kind of by accident. The various viceroys and regents will hand over their scepters, and the Invisible Nation will stand suddenly revealed to the mortal eye. Until then, we see through a glass darkly. As we learn more about our fellow citizens, as we gain new modalities of interacting with them like writing, television, the Internet – as we start crystallizing concepts like rights and utility and coordination – we become a little better able to guess.
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