[1] Daniel Schmachtenberger's work, as referenced in my Towards “Game B”, makes this case. Both Daniel's work and that essay of mine spells it out.
[2] See What the Hell are Values?, Part 1 for a full treatment of the understanding of values here. It comes from work in the philosophy of agency and choice, and the role of values in behavior, choice, and reasons, by philosophers like David Velleman, Ruth Chang, Isaac Levi, Amartya Sen, Charles Taylor and Elizabeth Anderson.
[3] See Four Social Worlds 🕵️♂️🌳💍📈 for more about how values get crowded out by norms and goals. We have a analysis technique (Meaning Analysis ) for seeing when this crowding out occurs.
[4] I discuss all of these crises in Towards “Game B”.
[5] More on these distinctions at Four Social Worlds 🕵️♂️🌳💍📈.
[6] If you run a social network and want to build survey techniques that differentiate between ideological commitments and values, or turtles and rabbits, see Time Well Spent Metrics or take our class HS202: Monitoring for Values and How They’re Working Out .
[7] Our Turtleocracy is one attempt at this.
[8] We hope to build something in this space, that we're calling the Test Network.
[9] Corporations are also supposed to be self-updating, with a board of stakeholders that can change bylaws, operating agreements, and other policies. But this, also, is slow, mostly done by lawyers, and mostly in response to finance.
[10] Robin Hanson has shared many good ideas about experimental policy, including Futarchy and this prediction market paper.
[11] Systems like Jonathan Edwards' Chorus, Transcript, or my own Bonobo.
[12] Like the above mentioned CommunityRule, but also more established initiatives like Creative Commons, Stripe Atlas, etc.
[13] Most people aren't even aware these are games with a certain structure. I wrote about this blindness in Why is Design So Invisible?.
[14] What if one person is practicing loyalty while another is practicing presence? This might require inventing a new game that works for both, or perhaps one player can inspire the other with her value. (Unlike ideological commitments, other people's values are easy to try on for size.)
[15] We teach a general method for these designs.
We also have metrics, surveys and evaluation techniques for collecting evidence about whether your redesigned systems have made it easier for people to live by their values, and have led to meaningful relationships, work, and so on. (They descend from the capability approach, a human-values based evaluation methodology pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and used by the World Bank and in other large scale projects. But we address some problems with the capability approach: it's imprecise notion of values ("capabilities and functionings"), and its tendency to assume universal human values. See HS202: Monitoring for Values and How They’re Working Out .)
Note: even with these methods, redesigning social systems is very hard. Designing organizations, democratic mechanisms, and so on itself is hard, and adding these new criteria to the mix just makes it harder.
- Large-scale organizations use processes like quarterly reports, hierarchy, sales divisions, promotions for hitting the numbers which are triumphs of coordination, but only work some of the time. See Foundations of Turtleocracy for more on the challenge of org design.
- The situation is similar with political and economic systems at larger scales. New institutions need to deal with all of the problems of fraud, information asymmetry, minority rights, etc that old institutions have evolved to deal with.
- It is hard to even assemble the intellectual and intuitive toolset one needs to begin redesigning these systems. The relevant expertise is spread across many disciplines including political theory, microeconomics, game theory, the philosophy of values and choice, sociology, and more.
- And much of the expertise is not available academically, but only within the economic, political, and org systems that need to be redesigned.
[15] "Company Values" are one of the things that keep personal values non-consequential in entrenched systems! If a large organization has a CEO and many worker bees below him who have little autonomy, then only the CEO's inspirations can shake things up. There's a similar effect with company missions, purposes, master metrics, and "corporate values". When a corporation has clear "values", it doesn't have to recognize and reorganize around the emerging and diverse values of its employees.
[16] See What the Hell are Values?, Part 1 and Worksheet - Emotions to Values (Feb 2020) for our guide on articulating values. We train students in an interview technique (Epiphany Interviews) that gets other people to articulate their values (how they want to treat people, approach things, live, and so on) and an introspection technique (Emotions to Values) for finding your own values inside your emotions. Sometimes values don't need to be written down—new aesthetic values travel through creative scenes like hiphop or blues guitar via videos which inspire others to try new styles and see new possibilities.