Constitutional Convention
Article
Constitutional Convention is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2022 and July 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “There is a time of great malleability: maybe during the Constitutional Convention”; “The Constitutional Convention was held entirely in secret”; “following the Constitutional Convention”. It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, abolitionist literature, AI.
Metadata
- Category: Events
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: August 23, 2022
- Last seen: July 07, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
-
- abolitionist literature (1 shared issues)
-
- AI (1 shared issues)
-
- AI Alignment (1 shared issues)
-
- AI risk (1 shared issues)
-
- Ajeya Cotra (1 shared issues)
-
- al-Qaeda (1 shared issues)
-
- Alberto Parmigiani (1 shared issues)
-
- America (1 shared issues)
-
- Andorra (1 shared issues)
-
- Andrew Yang (1 shared issues)
-
- animal welfare (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
MacAskill frames this in terms of value malleability and value lock-in. There is a time of great malleability: maybe during the Constitutional Convention, if some delegate had given a slightly more elegant speech, they might have ditched the Senate or doubled the length of a presidential term or something. But after the Constitution was signed - and after it developed centuries of respect, and after tense battle lines got drawn up over every aspect of it - it became much harder to change the Constitution, to the point where almost nobody seriously expects this to work today. If another Chinese philosopher had fought a little harder in 100 BC, maybe his school would have beaten Confucius’ and the next 2000 years of Chinese history would have looked totally different.
The United States actually began with secret deliberation. The Constitutional Convention was held entirely in secret. The public was not allowed to observe, the doors and windows were sealed, and the minutes were not published until the death of James Madison in 1840. Deliberating in this manner had a number of desirable effects.
A famous example of this problem is from the Constitutional Convention. Slave states didn’t try to offer any kind of justification for slavery. Instead, they simply stated that they would refuse to join the union unless slavery was allowed. This would have been harder to do if the meeting was held in public.
The canonical example of this is the Federalist Papers, following the Constitutional Convention. Several members of the convention published essays that aimed to promote the ratification of the Constitution. They also provided insight into the founders’ intent, offering detailed arguments in favor of a strong central government and a balanced division of powers. This helped two of the four problems: the respect deficit and the problem of ignorance.