Pluralism
Description
Glen Weyl:
"I understand pluralism to be a social philosophy that recognizes and fosters the flourishing of and cooperation between a diversity of sociocultural groups/systems.
I see two sides to pluralism, institutional and epistemic.
- Institutional pluralism is a contrast with a broad range of social philosophies that might be described as “monist” (I ironically called these ALONE or Atomized Liberalism and Objectivist Naïve Epistemology in a related piece). Monist philosophies tend to focus either on isolated individuals and/or on a unitary/universal structure in which these individuals reside. The atomistic ideology predicated on the isolated individual is often used to justify capitalism, because it emphasizes groups as much as individuals. However, for institutional pluralism, groups are not mere vehicles for individual interests but are of fundamental interest. Meanwhile, the centralistic ideology predicated on a unitary or universal structure is often used to justify populist statism and nationalism. In contrast, institutional pluralism denies the centrality of any one group/collective, such as the nation state, global humanity, etc.
- Epistemic pluralism is a contrast to traditions that seek out unitary, commensurable ways of knowing (most prominently technocracy). It does so by denying that any single rational logic or meritocratic scheme can select for optimal social ordering. Instead, it emphasizes the importance of a diverse range of incommensurable collective entities and cultures of knowledge that intersect and collaborate."
(https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/why-i-am-a-pluralist/)
Characteristics
Glen Weyl:
"The first is what might be called “dynamism” or “liberalism”, namely that I view evolution of the set of social groups as critical to the success of pluralism. This contrasts with conservative and much religious and consociational thought, where the plurality of groups constituting society is often seen as static.
The second is “self-government” or “democracy”, namely that I think it is crucial for the pluralistic groups to be accountable to the individuals who make them up, without putting those individuals above the groups in fundamental significance. This contrasts with reactionary thought (such as fascism and corporatism), where groups usually have an authoritarian, personalistic and hierarchical structure.
The last is what might be called “cooperation”, namely that we should aim for cooperation and roughly coherence/consensus across social groups towards common goals, which contrasts with much postmodernism, relativism and nihilism."
(https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/why-i-am-a-pluralist/)
PRINCIPLES FOR PLURALITY
Glen Weyl:
"Hopefully the parallels between plural institutions and epistemics are now coming into view. To sharpen the parallel, I’ll distill it into a collection of principles applicable in both cases:
Recognition: Recognize (formally or intellectually) social groups/schools of thought and accord them epistemic or institutional status beyond the sum of members/individual ideas that make them up.
Subsidiarity: Activities and topics that primarily concern a particular social group, its members or the ideas it focuses on are delegated to the collective control of or intellectual authority of that group, rather than directly structured by a broader level of organization or analysis. Meanwhile, broader levels of organization/analysis to a significant degree concern themselves with interactions among narrower ones rather than directly with the behavior of individuals/specific analysis.
Neutrality: A set of widely acceptable formalisms and analytic practices should govern the interaction across social groups/analytic fields (and individuals), such that all have rough consensus that the rules of the game under which they operate do not inherently favor one group/field over another.
Cooperation across diversity: Actions and views that receive assent across a range of social groups deserve greater credence, even when holding fixed any profile of individual degrees of assent.
Adaptation: The set of recognized groups and fields should adapt to natural changes in the set of groups that are broadly understood to be important to social and intellectual intercourse and encouraging dynamic formation of new patterns of social affinity and intellectual investigation is a goal of the social system."
(https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/why-i-am-a-pluralist/)
Discussion
CHALLENGES FOR INSTITUTIONAL PLURALISM
Glen Weyl:
"Merely demonstrating the internal coherence of pluralism, even if the sketch above could be completed, is only a first step. There are many natural critiques that monists might level against pluralism. As above, I will only briefly respond to them; a full and persuasive response would not just require too much space but more importantly, as I’ll turn to next, would require much more research and development than exists today. Nonetheless, I believe there are good reasons to be hopeful these problems can be surmounted. These are critiques I take very seriously, as they are ones I have leveled myself against other social philosophies, as I will highlight below.
Is Plurality underspecified?
While lots of thinking seems to support plural institutions of some form, these are far from converging on some single optimal graph protocol and in fact this whole line of argument gives grounds for pessimism that such will ever be possible. This raises some basic problems for Plurality. First, do pluralists really stand for anything? Is there enough they can agree on and hope to commonly defend? Second, doesn’t this flexibility give a great deal of room for elites with technology knowledge to design apparently neutral pluralist protocols that in fact privilege their narrow perspective and/or interests? This second concern has been particularly prominent in my own writing in the past.
I am cautiously optimistic that many provably optimal or approximately optimal protocols to address specific models above will turn out to be robustly approximately optimal in several of the models or at least to greatly outperform the monist alternatives. If this hope is validated it should be possible to maintain epistemic pluralism without undermining the success of Plurality. If pluralists can agree that there is at least a class of plural institutions that all of them prefer over monist alternatives, reasonable diversity in which are applied can coexist with a movement supporting the broad (and epistemically pluralist) deployment of plural institutions. And if this class consists of a relatively small number of reasonably robust protocols, the space for parametric manipulation to narrow interests can be contained.
Is Plurality too risky?
Identifying practically useful and not merely theoretically supported institutions will require significant social experimentation with their use. Many of these institutions will be novel and require significant social digestion to work to their potential. Performing this at the level of the sort of society that I used to motivate the problem seems incredibly risky, especially at a time when various technology-mediated social experiments are already wreaking havoc. Is there a reasonably safe pathway to the adoption of plural institutions?
Luckily, we have seen the emergence in the last decade of a rich and growing space for experimentation with new social technologies. Two leading examples are the “Web 3” community and the new cluster of “digital democracies” led by Taiwan but also including the extended Baltic countries and significant pockets of East Asia and Australasia. A wide range of new modes of social organization are being explored in these spaces to significant success and both the Taiwanese case and significant pockets of the Web 3 community share an orientation to pluralist values. This suggests natural laboratories for relatively safely — but with real social engagement and stakes — experimenting with these new social technologies. Furthermore, the very multilevel conception of social organization pluralism embraces naturally opens space for experimentation, as pockets of a range of organizations (churches, corporations, city governments, labor unions, etc.) are natural places for experimentation to both proceed and eventually scale.
Cities politically exemplify a scale of organization that seems maximally ripe for such experimentation, as there are roughly as many cities in the world as people in a typical city, but all significant organizations have some similar level where experimentation is natural and problems pluralism can naturally solve. Consider corporations, where divisional differentiation is widely seen as necessary and as a fundamental source of some of the worst problems facing businesses; plural institutions seem a natural solution space.
Is Plurality too centralized?
Another concern is that the algorithms above seem to rely on a panoptical perspective on social relationships, performing intricate calculations on the entirety of a social graph. Such a panoptical view is both unrealistic and even if it could be achieved would be undesirable for any entity to have because of its intrusive nature.
While I again strongly agree with the motivations behind this concern, I am skeptical that it necessarily need apply in this case. Certainly some implementations of the protocols above would depend on a panoptical perspective, but a wide range of protocols on graphs can be run in a highly decentralized (or at very least polycentric) and low-to-zero-knowledge fashion, with limited harms to performance. Given the extensive literature and development of protocols in this vein, it seems to me that concerns about centralization can and should be a (soft and flexible) constraint as we seek to design plausible pluralist social technologies, but it seems unlikely that this constraint will eliminate the most attractive candidate solutions.
Is Plurality manipulable?
A closely related concern is that the pluralist mechanisms above seek to “subsidize” or otherwise support bridging ties and unlikely consensus across previously uncooperative social groups. In seeking to do so, they appear to relatively “tax” strong social relations, providing cause for these relations to be suppressed or hidden from the eye of the system.
At the same time, there are important principles of incentive design that Plurality embraces and extends. The first, often called “monotonicity” among economists, is the idea that systems should, when their goals align with those of agents, defer to the preferences of those agents. Subsidiarity may be seen as the extension of this principle to groups which pluralism recognizes as standard economic theory does agents.
A second principle is “countervailing incentives”; that is if a system creates an incentive for an agent to exaggerate some variable, there should be an offsetting incentive to understate this variable. A classic example is the Harberger Tax, where the usual incentive of a property owner to overstate the price they’d require to sell their property is offset by making a tax dependent on the price they commit to sell at. While again the details may vary by specific algorithm and it is reasonable to focus on the value of this principle as a constraint on designs, it seems natural that well-executed Plurality would tend to precisely involve such countervailing incentives.
In an ambitious implementation of Plurality, one would expect money owned by individuals (a single variable connoting universal social value/esteem) to be replaced with some higher dimensional social currency connoting esteem held by individuals within a variety of social communities or relationships. Agents would tend to have incentives to overstate these in the same manner they would like to have greater wealth in a standard capitalist economy. But this incentive would tend to offset the incentives in Plurality for understating social relationships to receive “subsidies” for forging them. Similar logic would apply to community incentives for overstating the strength of interest in some topic, the degree of solidarity and the strength of internal institutions in order to maximize subsidiary delegation of topics to that community: incentives to maximize delegation offset against those to maximize subsidies for collaboration.
While this may all seem quite abstract, it has counterparts in ordinary affairs that give me some real hope that it would work out in formal systems. We rarely see, for example, white men choosing to try to pass as, say, black women despite the alleged incentives that “affirmative action” would tend to create for doing so for the simple reason that being a white man is a source of social power that few would want to give up for whatever the limited benefits of “affirmative action” might be. In fact, we even see limits to attempts to “pass” in the other direction, given the social costs even to marginalized communities of undermining the social bonds they have forged. This is not to say there are no social groups that try to hide their solidarities, especially when they are heavily persecuted, but in a world where social capital is king (our world clearly, and even more so in a world governed by plural institutions), it seems unlikely that the primary problem would be people trying to undermine their holdings thereof.
Is Plurality legitimate
Perhaps the most serious challenge to Plurality is that it may be too rich/complicated in their design to be socially digested and legitimated. This seems like a real challenge to me and one that inevitably involves some degree of trade-offs between optimality and legitimatability. No doubt the adoption of mechanisms of such richness will have to proceed through a range of experimentation, artistic exploration, exposition, education and perhaps even through new technologies of understanding, such as virtual reality simulations.
While I have little doubt that this will be a genuine problem and put real and meaningful limits on how much can be achieved, there seems little argument for avoiding ventures into Plurality entirely on these grounds. Quite the contrary: given the wide range of possibilities it seems quite likely that some, likely significantly suboptimal, plural institutions will be possible that will have excellent user interface, be easy for people to get a sense for etc. There is much precedent for this in the history of computer technology. Such “human factors” deserve paramount attention as they have received in the best phases of the development of personal computing and the internet and not the sense of being an afterthought, they often are within the Artificial Intelligence community. But at the same time they don’t strike me as necessarily insurmountable barriers to getting started. Furthermore, there are many protocols that seem just as byzantine and hard to legitimate (e.g. Proof of Stake or many black box statistical methods) that aren’t very plural and have nonetheless achieved significant success and legitimation recently. In short, I hope the critical question of legitimation will constantly be posed about Plurality as a scalpel to shape them, but not as a cudgel to prevent their development in the first place.
In fact, there is a sense in which I think Plurality may not only be legitimatable but may be some of the only reasonable directions for broadly legitimate and ambitious reform of our foundational social institutions. After all, many of the most important and transformative moments in defining the contemporary political landscape have relied on plural institutions that must have seemed fairly opaque at the time and arose from compromises between competing groups (e.g. the US constitution). Given the commitment of large chunks of the public in liberal democracies to some form of pluralism (especially among conservatives and the new left) and the commitment of other segments to formalism and technology, Plurality may be the most plausible ground of convergence, our best hope for significant fundamental social change."
(https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/why-i-am-a-pluralist/)