Metis and .*-rationality

High modernism, spontaneous order, legibility, the Great Society, technocracy, local knowledge, normies and sects



George argues AI and automation are at odds:

… the vast majority of use-cases for AI, especially the flashy kind that behaves in a "human-like" way, might be just fixing coordination problems around automation.

AI, from this perspective, is something like β€œthe computational overhead of metis”.

Thus we end up with rather complex jobs; Where something like AGI could be necessary to fully replace the person. But at the same time, these jobs can be trivially automated if we redefine the role and take some of the fuzziness out.

A bartender robot is beyond the dreams of contemporary engineering. A cocktail making machine, conveyer belt (or drone) that delivers drinks, ordering and paying through a tablet on your table... beyond trivial.

I would like to return to this point. Is legibility just the simplest thing?

Legibility and communicative standards

See intelligibility as compatibility for an analysis of speech in terms of technical standards.

References

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Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. 2002. β€œSocial Capital And Community Governance.” The Economic Journal 112 (483): F419–36.
Buitron, Natalia, and Hans SteinmΓΌller. 2021. β€œGoverning Opacity: Regimes of Intention Management and Tools of Legibility.” Ethnos 0 (0): 1–25.
Cocker, Emma. 2017. β€œWeaving Codes/Coding Weaves: Penelopean MΓͺtis and the Weaver-Coder’s Kairos.” TEXTILE 15 (2): 124–41.
Gintis, Herbert, Eric Smith, and Samuel Bowles. 2001. β€œCostly Signaling and Cooperation.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 213 (1): 103–19.
Hayek, Friedrich. 1979. Law, Legislation and Liberty. Vol. 3. London: Routledge And Kegan Paul Ltd.
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Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. β€œThe Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–30.
β€”β€”β€”. 1988. The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Vol. 1. Routledge.
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Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, Richard McElreath, et al. 2005. β€œβ€˜Economic Man’ in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 795.
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Lanier, Jaron. 2010. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
O’Connor, Cailin. 2015. β€œAmbiguity Is Kinda Good Sometimes.” Philosophy of Science 82 (1): 110–21.
β€”β€”β€”. 2017. β€œEvolving to Generalize: Trading Precision for Speed.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2).
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). Cambridge University Press.
β€”β€”β€”. 1992. β€œThe Rudiments of a Theory of the Origins, Survival, and Performance of Common Property Institutions.” Making the Commons Work: Theory, Practice and Policy.
β€”β€”β€”. 1998. β€œA Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action.” The American Political Science Review 92: 1–22.
β€”β€”β€”. 2000. β€œCollective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 14: 137–58.
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. 2001. Island Press.
Prasad, Monica. 2022. β€œProto-Bureaucracies.” Sociological Science 9 (September): 374–405.
Scott, J. 1998. Thinking Like a State.
Tawney, Richard H. 1926. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. 1st edition. London ; New York: Pelican Books.

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