This feels quite important, especially in the context of "dying Less Wrong":
Bottom line: I know of only one minimum viable architecture for turning individuals into a superorganism — for making sure it’s in everyone’s self-interest to work together. I call it the Prestige Economy, and it runs on a deceptively simple rule:
Individuals should grant social status to others for advancing the superorganism’s goals.
-- source
What do you think is the best example of this kind of principle at work? My first guess would be academia, but I can also think of a dozen reasons why the prestige system in academia is flawed.
My intuition is that there is really no shining example of the prestige economy in the real world - but whether this has to do with the difficulty of implementation, or a flaw with the idea itself, I'm not sure.
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