Reply to post: Re: Could this idea be more backwards?

Regulate This! Time to subject algorithms to our laws

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Could this idea be more backwards?

But then comes the armor-piercing question.

"Can you think of any better without changing the human race as a whole?"

Oh good grief, how can you not? Nothing is provable in a comment (that requires tons of a priori reasoning followed by experimentation), but there is an absolute mountain of theory to throw at the subject:

1) A system of ethics (and government is just a practical application of this) should function unilaterally: that is to say, my ability to coexist and interact peacefully with others should not require that the others share my values. Tons of stuff has been written on this.

2) Ethics are simple. The problem is that people want things or want to do things that can't be accomplished ethically, so we introduce rationalization. Rationalization is complicated. If ethics appear to be complicated, then start eliminating rationalization.

3) Representative government does not scale well. I don't pretend to know where the line is where it starts to fall apart (and that would vary by culture), but my wild guess would be 50,000 people for an overall entity.

4) I'm discarding direct democracy, as that's just an ISO-Certified methodology for mob rule.

5) Forcibly grouping people into blocs based on which map coordinates of the planet they happened to be at when they exited their mother's womb is perhaps not the worst way to organize societies, but it has to be close. Lumping people together based on geography stopped making sense at least 50 years ago, and gets worse every day. Government should be something you join, like a church or a Rotary Club or something, because it actually reflects your values. And you should be reasonably free to change governments fairly easily. If you, in your heart of hearts, want to be a hardcore communist you should be able to go be a hardcore communist. If you want to be the opposite (anarcho-capitalist?), then go do that. If you want something in between, you should be able to find something that suits you. Some people love leisure, and some people love work. Some people love to work with others, some prefer to work alone or in small groups. None of these approaches is inherently wrong, but mixing these types in the same government is problematic at best - people then are incentivized to force others to be Their Type.

6) Any organizational methodology that involves being constantly at war is almost certainly defective. The rationalization for this is that the world is full of assholes that must be dealt with through military might, but if this never ends then chances are you're the asshole. One thing I've learned through world travel is that most people just want to be left alone in peace. That doesn't mean that they don't get angry or have grievances, but that almost never drives them to violence on its own because most stuff just isn't worth getting you or your family and friends killed over. It's governments (and occasionally religion) that rile them up, under pretenses that almost invariably turn out to be dishonest.

7) Somebody will always get screwed in the end. If you try to eliminate this entirely, you only guarantee screwing everyone. I would personally value systems that are more quick and flexible with self-correction over systems that are slow.

And I could probably go on for another 20 pages, but this should be enough to get somebody going.

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