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This is a microcosm of the problem with the agency people. “High agency” often just means “putting all cognition energy into obsessive self-gain”. AI that lies to people about dieting? High agency. Made something addicting with little social benefit? High agency. Foregoing relationships and social identity in order to be like the dude from Whiplash with low mood and a TFR of 0.50? High agency.
When all of your elites become high agency, the culture is ruined. No one will have the desire or the ability to solve collective action problems. Something wrong with crime? Sorry, all the high agency people have simply moved to a higher income area. Cheating scandals? All the high agency people know to use chat AI to scaffold their essays. Obesity? No one is there to consider longterm causes, because that’s not high agency. And when America is finally ruined, all the high agency will be on the first flight out of the country.
Great comment.
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I (we) cannot fix crime. We can flee it though. I do what I am capable of, not what is hypothetically possible if hard coordination problems were solved.
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As @quiet_NaN said below, agency (that is, the ability to be an independent agent) is not necessarily correlated with asociality (that is, the tendency to devalue/neglect the collective good). While there's a degree of social conformity that's required to maintain the commons, a dearth of distributed agency/agentic elite causes a society to follow the path of least resistance, usually to its detriment. Some(well, most) societies are built to require less distributed agency/more social conformity (e.g. East Asia), but they tend to be outcompeted by more individualistic but still commonwealth-respecting societies (e.g. the West).
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I think that agency is somewhat orthogonal to morality.
Low agency people (like myself, TBH) who do what all the others around them are doing are unlikely to stand out in either a good or bad way much. (They will still have a large overall impact which could be good or bad, though.)
Some high agency found EAs and try very hard to make the world a better place. Some high agency people try to rip off people to fund their underage sex islands. Some build successful companies producing dental drills. There is a much larger variety of ethical impact per person, but one can hardly say that they are all bad.
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Couldn't agree more. High agency is often just a code wood for tearing down mores and norms for personal gain. I said something similar in a tweet myself.
Are you on twitter? DM me I'd love to follow you hah. Your writing is solid.
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