Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

meta-norms

created 2020-07-09 · edited 2020-07-09 · open in Roam
  • I want to elaborate on this
    • twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1281131593948692480
    • different ways that norms can be
      • functional, stable, self-perpetuating
        • error-correcting but not improving
        • examples:
          • traditional societies, both hunter-gatherer & agricultural
            • anywhere where the norms & meta-norms are actually common knowledge and they don't change on any noticeable timescale
            • David Chapman's "choiceless mode"
          • maybe also systematic norms that are static because
            • they are the rules of a game, that are not being questioned for the duration of the game
            • they were created by a founder, now dead, but on some timescale are fairly robust
            • they're sufficiently complicated that appending them much at all is clearly a fool's errand
            • the metanorms themselves are intended to evolve but in an asymptotically convergent way, that doesn't invent something unrecognizeably new, just learns to handle unforeseen situations
              • jewish rabbinic tradition seems to be like this (lmk what the more specific term is)
              • also, oddly, the US constitution ended up being instantiated in kind of this way
                • it's not like they thought it wouldn't evolve, but they also didn't really plan for its evolution to leave the original apparent attractor basin
      • functional, dynamic, upward spiral
        • error-correcting and improving - conscious evolutionary
        • what David Deutsch talks about in relation to rational memeplexes
        • broadly this is clearly the thing to aim for
      • dysfunctional, collapse
        • no coherent meta-norms at all, mostly falls apart, maybe painfully
        • various social groups
        • america at large over the last few increasingly-atomized decades
      • dysfunctional, dynamic, downward spiral
        • ratchets into more & more extremes
        • examples:
          • various cults
          • cancel culture / wokeism, where the meta-norms make it structurally impossible for anyone to say "guys I think we've gone too far" and have that be recognized
    • 2×2 on community norms:
  • oh maybe this is relevant
  • some older tweets that are relevant

1 linked reference

July 9th, 2020