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Under construction
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Dear Imaginary Reader,
This was originally intended to be a personal manifesto of sorts, where I laid out what I thought politics should look like, but discussing that involves laying out what politics is and where it lies in the bigger picture.
While laying that out as an introduction, I ended up writing this mostly standalone explanation which is more or less a framing of how western democracies make compromises and collaborate at scale; this article gets its name from the programming concept of a protocol stack, where each layer is implemented using the layer beneath.
The goal here is to apolitically frame the question of politics, so when discussing politics it is easier to point at exactly what you are changing and why that is a good thing.
Thanks for reading!
Charlie
In order to agree on what changes should be made to the world, we must agree on what the goal of those changes are. Figuring out the goal of collective action is difficult, because individual people’s goals are so diverse: some people want to become ballet dancers, others just want to get through airport security, and others yet want to eat dry roasted peanuts. For the sake of this discussion, I want to split this space of all possible goals into two categories: axiomatic goals, and derived goals.
Derived goals are goals one pursues because they help further some other goal. For example, one may pursue the goal of accumulating money, because it allows them to achieve their other goal of avoiding the pain of hunger. Another example may be the goal of eating the dust in the bottom of a bag of dry roasted peanuts in the pursuit of the goal of experiencing soul shuddering flavour explosions.
Axiomatic goals are those we pursue for their own sake and intrinsic reward, not because they have a positive consequence on something else. For example, we exert effort to avoid painful experiences because they are painful, not because experiencing pain will have some secondary undesired consequence. We do not pursue axiomatic goals because we consciously decided to do so, we pursue them because we are optimisation algorithms which select actions which best achieve them. I say this to define which goals are axiomatic, not as a comment on human nature.
We pursue axiomatic goals simply as consequence of our construction; much like how a computer does not choose to execute its programs, it simply executes them because that is what physics does to those particular combinations of circuits and electrons.
Different people have different axiomatic goals, and one’s axiomatic goals can change over time, but there are significant similarities between most peoples axiomatic goals, much like how we are diverse in appearance, but are mostly similar in the number of arms and legs we have. Some common terminal goals include: