THE REBELLION AGAINST A MULTIPLE-VANTAGE-POINT WORLD

A while back “The Onion” made a sarcastic video about students having trouble understanding the concept of object permanence. This is the idea that when you see an apple, and then you stop looking at it, it is still there.

But there actually is a simple concept required for civilization to function – not for a lone individual or tribe but for a complex civilization to function – and which if people fail to recognize, they will forever try to create a world that cannot function.

This is the idea that when one person sees an apple, another person does not see it or know about it. And this is impossible to ever completely overcome. There is never a single “there is an apple”. And this is both the central problem civilization must overcome, and the main benefit the world has to make use of (because it enables us to process more information than a single decision maker could process). Rather than trying to solve the problems we would be faced with if everyone saw and knew the same things, and solve them as if everyone did.

Imagine if every time you wanted to go to the grocery store, you had to argue with your family about whether you have a car, because some imagine you don’t simply because it is in the garage where they can’t see it. Most of our political debates result from different assumptions about the extent to which people at different vantage points know different things. And from different degrees of recognizing that the problem we have to overcome is that they don’t, rather than proceeding from the assumption that they do.

This is glossing over the main problem, and then not understanding why others are fighting against you. The world we live in is almost as dysfunctional as if you had to spend every day arguing with your family about how to get to the grocery store. Based on disagreements about whether a car exists which you can’t see. Or whether you can see everything.

Simple ideas about how we can use elections to get government employees to do things that benefit us, gloss over the problems of how can you tell the government what you want, and how can you see what the government is doing and what the effects are? Can you see everything government is doing? Or can they hide it from you and lie about it? Can government know what you want from an election? Or do we need local decision makers to discover this information and make decisions based on it?

This is the same as the disagreement that some people think we need private businesses like McDonalds to figure out what food we want and provide it for us. And others imagine that the government could discover what food we want and provide it to us. Some imagine this can basically be done by voters monitoring the decisions of every McDonalds manager, and voting to replace the ones who don’t give people the food they want.

How about the government just deports the illegal immigrants who are members of gangs? The problem is that the government does not know which illegal immigrants are members of gangs, and you don’t know what the government is doing. In effect, a government official can tell you “I see an apple, and I am eating it.” The problem is not what to do if everyone had perfect information or the same information as everyone else. And there is a related problem of assuming everyone has the same values and agenda. The problem is overcoming that we don’t.

And it is also a problem of people who imagine everyone sees and wants the same things, creating a world where they are taken advantage of by people who hide things in the area where they are not looking. So that people are captured almost as if by magicians. (For example, my friend is serving life without parole from age 21 for a crime which did not happen and all the evidence was faked.)

There are people who tell others “this is what we see”, and people are captured by impulse into accepting things as a single social consensus. This is the primitive system for solving the vantage-point problem, where people in the same group with the same values tell each other what they see to arrive at a collective consensus. This primitive system fails, when the network does not survive or perish as a single group, and instead a person who is misled can suffer while a person who does the misleading can benefit.

And it is a problem that even where we have processes in place designed for a multiple-vantage-point world – such as private businesses and jury trials – single-vantage-pointers will forever be trying to sabotage and replace these processes based on not seeing the problem they are solving, often from within such as judges.

So that the entire system of civilization which is designed to get people to do things which benefit other people, gives over to selfishness and destruction in the areas people can’t see. Rather than realizing the problem is to penetrate those areas. In effect to get people to employ the apple which only they know about, in a way that benefits others.

The simple system people want, who imagine everyone has the same values and information, is to hold a meeting for us to all get on the same page about what information we know and what values we want to serve, tell the executive branch what to do, and then watch whether the executive branch does it.

The complex system our civilization has evolved, to solve the problem we actually face, is local distributed decision makers using private information, characterized by:
1) knowledge of a domain, e.g. farming,
2) information the knowledge is applied to, e.g. the precipitation in a certain tract of land,
3) incentives and constraints that convey public costs and benefits to decision makers, such as the price system or established preferences recorded in laws, and
4) other independent decision makers who monitor whether each other are breaking the rules, with local processes to create penalties for breaking the rules.

There is no second vantage point where other people can check whether these distributed decision makers did the right things, because there is no second vantage point that can know the information they had. So second vantage points can only check intermittently whether such decision makers are following the rules, and deter them from breaking the rules with penalties on the occasion when they are caught breaking them. And because a single collective cannot monitor all these nodes to see whether they are breaking the rules, competing local departments are established as checks to monitor one another (like the two-person system for missile launches).

Most people don’t know most of the things most people are doing, or most people want. And yet the activities of complete strangers are encouraged and coordinated to serve the interests of people they never met, often in ways no person is conscious of. There is no second shortcut process, by which we can observe what the distributed process is doing, and consciously judge and change it. No single vantage point from which we can do this.