The New Enlightenment with Ashley

This is an exploration of the ethics of nudging. I argue that problems that could arise even if perfect altruistic people were the ones doing the nudging, and that this is a Tragedy of the Commons.

This is the first part of my book review on Tim Urban’s book “What’s Our Problem?” In this video, I explain Tim Urban’s ladder and how it relates to both Jonathan Haidt’s elephant and Rider and also Daniel Kahneman’s System I and System II. I build on the ladder model by introducing the concept of formation (spiritual formation or emotional formation).

Social scientists can sometimes over-emphasize the hero-victim-perpetrator dynamic in the way they view and characterize groups. This is a salience problem. The solution is to spend time thinking about the hero traits of every group, and especially groups that we (as social scientists) place in the victim or perpetrator role too often.

This is the first part of my book review on Tim Urban’s book “What’s Our Problem?”. In this video, I explain his emergence diagram and how it relates to collective intelligence and the movement of technology.

This video provides a critique for the anti-woke part of Tim Urban’s book. I am on his side in terms of arguing in favor of liberal values over social justice when those come into conflict. But his approach falls into some of the anti-woke tribe blind spots.

As a possible solution to the problem of rich people and corporations bending the legal system in their favor, I explore the possibility of developing a public fund that people pay into to hire private legal defense at rates proportional to what they pay in.

I make a case that it would be possible for robots to deepen the interaction between humans, if we choose to use robots for this purpose.

Social media does a powerful job of shaping our intuitions about reality, but not a great job of matching vetted reality to our intuitions. This video explores the difference between our intuitive perceptions and vetted perceptions of the world, and the ways that social media may distort them to our detriment.

In this video, I discuss Jim Rutt’s idea for having congresspeople run under a “liquid democracy” commitment. The idea is explained in more detail in the following blog post: https://medium.com/@memetic007/reclaiming-american-democracy-starting-right-now-339c13ed5a4 (Scroll down to the Liquid Democracy Candidate Pledge) For more on Liquid Democracy and how it works you can see my video… https://youtu.be/ZU7cWLGcfxE … or Jim Rutt’s explanation… https://medium.com/@memetic007/liquid-democracy-9cf7a4cb7f (An Introduction to Liquid Democracy Referenced in the video: The following Ted Talk from Lawrence Lessig called “Our democracy no longer represents the people” at ~8:25 https://youtu.be/PJy8vTu66tE?t=501 Image by Coffee Bean from Pixabay

This video explains the mob and the tyrant as characters in the story of the New Enlightenment, for institutional designers to design protections into the system against.

I explain the game theory of how shaming can solve multipolar traps. I also explain three problems with this, including the spite that leads to backlash, and the breakdown of feedback mechanisms that tell people whether their shaming strategy is working.

Considering major corporate fraud situations, like FTX, Theranos and Enron, it is useful to think about how the system is supposed to work to hold firms accountable. In this video, I draw a map of all of the information flow that is supposed to hold firms accountable. The idea is that the system should not rely on the integrity of a single CEO.

I give an overview of some of the key points in the AI Objective Institute’s White Paper. Also, I have no affiliation with the AI Objectives Institute. I’m just an interested reader. Here is the paper: https://aiobjectives.org/whitepaper This paper takes a hopeful view of artificial intelligence while also giving a framework for some of the bigger risks related to A.I.

This video explains how computer code can act like DNA in terms of evolving computer systems and blockchain-based institutions.

This video explores a way of visualizing economic systems based on the problems that people in the system attune themselves toward. This is a white rabbit (Alice in Wonderland reference) video.

This video explains three different ways that artificial intelligence can get out of the box, and compares them. In doing so, it goes through Goodhart’s Law and the relationship with AI.

This video explains what collective intelligence is by visualizing it and working from the following definition: “Collective intelligence is shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision-making.” (Wikipedia, early April 2022) The Collective Intelligence Project: https://cip.org/whitepaper Arrow's Impossibility Theorem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzLY8pLU95c

This video describes an example of the way pluralism could be used to push back against elites who speak on behalf of groups they do not belong to. I’m exploring what pluralistic governance might look like, and this example helped me to visualize how it might be implemented in practice.

This video discusses the way information flows up hierarchies and distortions that can happen which stop people at the top from being able to accurately hear those at the bottom.

This video reviews Matt Ridley’s book How Innovation Works.

More and more often, there are weird hiccups in conversation where people misunderstand each other. This video explores the way that human brains use snap-to-grid thinking to understand and misunderstand each other.

This video asks the question: How is community changing? I describe the different styles of community, what they have in common, which types are expanding, which types are dying off, and how community relates to trust. One article I mention in the video is: McMillan, D. W., & Chavis, D. M. (1986). Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of community psychology, 14(1), 6-23. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/1520-6629(198601)14:1%3C6::AID-JCOP2290140103%3E3.0.CO;2-I

This video explains what sociocracy is and looks at its strengths and weaknesses as a governance mechanism.

This video goes through the idealized version of finance in the current economic system. I also walk through problems finance has in the current system. These are exercises to help us think toward a different economic system.

How does power corrupt? This video argues that salience framing is behind the relationship between power and corruption.