This post is eventually about partial agency. However, it's been a somewhat tricky point for me to convey; I take the long route. Epistemic status: slightly crazy.

I've occasionally said "Everything boils down to credit assignment problems."

What I really mean is that credit assignment pops up in a wide range of scenarios, and improvements to credit assignment algorithms have broad implications. For example:

• Politics.
  • When politics focuses on (re-)electing candidates based on their track records, it's about credit assignment. The practice is sometimes derogatorily called "finger pointing", but the basic computation makes sense: figure out good and bad qualities via previous performance, and vote accordingly.
  • When politics instead focuses on policy, it is still (to a degree) about credit assignment. Was raising the minimum wage responsible for reduced employment? Was it

Suppose you value some virtue V and you want to encourage people to be better at it.  Suppose also you are something of a “thought leader” or “public intellectual” — you have some ability to influence the culture around you through speech or writing.

Suppose Alice Almost is much more V-virtuous than the average person — say, she’s in the top one percent of the population at the practice of V.  But she’s still exhibited some clear-cut failures of V.  She’s almost V-virtuous, but not quite.

How should you engage with Alice in discourse, and how should you talk about Alice, if your goal is to get people to be more V-virtuous?

Well, it depends on what your specific goal is.

Raising the Global Median

If your goal is to raise the general population’s median V–level,...