alt Hacker NewsI think the appeal to the categorical imperative is very interesting though. Someone needs to try it. If everyone were wise as you term it, then it's essentially a stalemate while you wait for someone else to blink first and update.
Then again, there are other areas where I feel that Kantian ethics also fail on collective action problems. The use of index funds for example can be argued against on the same line as we argue against waiting to update. (That is, if literally everyone uses index funds then price discovery stops working.) I wonder if this argument fails because it ignores that there are a diversity of preferences. Some organizations might be more risk averse, some less so. Maybe that's the only observation that needs to be made to defeat the argument.
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> it's essentially a stalemate while you wait for someone else to blink first and update.
I addressed that in my comment, and you essentially repeated that point:
> I wonder if this argument fails because it ignores that there are a diversity of preferences.
The stalemate you described is only an issue if everyone is in the same circumstances and operating under the same criteria, but reality is very far from that situation.
With that diversity of preferences, some organizations might also be willing and able to do rigorous testing of the updates that are most important to them.
It seems like a helpful efficiency to spread out the testing burden (both deliberate testing and just updating and running into unexpected issues). If everyone updated everything immediately, everyone would be impacted by the same problems at the same time, which seems suboptimal.