Most proposals for how best to organize society come down to two distinct but related strategies: how to allocate resources (i.e. economics) and when to ethically deploy coercion (i.e. politics). Both of these concepts are laden with preconceptions so they need some unpacking to avoid confusion.

— Related by the concept of value

I imagine most readers have a visceral reaction to seeing politics defined as the use of coercion. First let’s define coercion as gaining compliance through a credible threat of significant harm. Again we’ll have to unpack almost all the terms in order to be precise.

An agent is an entity that behaves according to beliefs and preferences which are both kinds of bias. A bias here is just a simplified model of how an agent behaves under various conditions, so the definitions here are somewhat circular by design. Observers infer biases from behavior and attribute them to agents as a way to explain past behavior and predict future behavior. In this sense biases are more a property of agent models than of agents.

A belief is a bias to behave in a way that assumes the truth of belief. A preference is a bias to behave in way that assumes the desirability of the preference. There is a long history of drawing a sharp distinction between beliefs and preferences going back at least as far as Hume’s is-ought distinction however it is fairly easy to show that they are equivalent, every preference has a corresponding belief and vice versa. For example let’s say most people prefer honesty to deception under most circumstances. They would probably assent to the belief “Honesty is the best policy” or something along those lines. Similarly most people would probably agree that it is better to believe true statements than false statements so the same is true for any particular belief, it is preferable to believe it.