LessWrong (Curated & Popular) "Schelling Goodness, and Shared Morality as a Goal" by Andrew_Critch
Mar 6, 2026
They introduce the idea of Schelling goodness: moral verdicts as focal answers in coordination games among diverse civilizations. They explain how shared background, participation effects, and scale-invariance create strong focal norms. They give examples like stealing and Pareto-positive trade and discuss when cosmic Schelling morals are easy to identify. They touch on implications for tolerance, self-defense, and AI alignment.
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Schelling Participation Effect Increases Convergence
- The Schelling participation effect amplifies coordination by increasing confidence and turnout as group size grows when members intend to converge.
- Paris meetup examples (Eiffel Tower, noon) show recursive confidence: more participants => higher modal predictability => more joiners.
Transform Questions Into Schelling Versions
- The Schelling transformation reframes a question Q into S_P_Q: what would population P most commonly answer if everyone tried to match the plurality.
- This self-referential reframe often increases agreement because respondents reason about what others will pick.
Cosmic Shelling Population Defines Shared Morality
- Cosmic Schelling questions ask what a cosmically general population G would converge on if everyone tried to give the most common answer.
- The setup relies only on being a civilization, common knowledge, and metacognition, not shared history.