[extropy-chat] Examining Risks (was RE: META: List Quality)

[Jef Allbright]

As Winston Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government
except for all those others that have been tried."  From a systems
theoretic point of view, successful government (growth in terms of the
values of the people) is dependent on making well-informed and timely
decisions, and in this regard present forms of democracy are far from
optimum but better than other systems historically.

Just as the executives of public companies are measured in terms of
their approval of their shareholders, political leaders are measured
in terms of the approval of their constituencies, but the actual
success or failure of the enterprise depends on the knowledge and
skill (effectiveness) of these leaders within their particular
environment.

This pressure of general approval/disapproval contributes motivation
to be effective, but it contributes very little in practical terms of
(1) awareness of the relative vectors of specific values to be
promoted, or (2) awareness of effective methods for promotion of those
values.  So in the final evaluation, the decisions taken are dominated
by the existing power structure and the limited awareness of those in
power.

Such a system, expressing at least a scale of approval/dissapproval is
better than a system of central control where information flow is even
more restricted, but it is far from optimal.

Looking forward, I envision a system of social decision-making where
individuals are able to register their fine-grained subjective values
in a public database, and where policy is generated based on
principles of effective interaction that (increasingly) objectively
maximize the promotion of those values over increasing scope (of time,
of actors, and of type of interaction.)  Public service would become
the practice of improving the effectiveness of this framework for
broader positive-sum interaction, rather than fighting over narrowly
coveted slices of a perceived zero-sum pie.

- Jef
http://www.jefallbright.net
Increasing awareness for increasing morality

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On 2/25/06, kevinfreels.com <kevin at kevinfreels.com> wrote:
> Hal,
> Once again I am stunned by your powerful insight. You just made the case
> that people don't have to know what they are voting about to vote correctly.
> It is completely about the quality of life and the feeling that things are
> either better or worse. There is something very appealing about this. Would
> you mind going a bit further in depth? A few hundred years from know someone
> may do an analysis of  democratic governments and find that this is exactly
> how they worked and individuals with their issues didn;t make one bit of
> difference. It would be interestiung to plot this out as a computer model if
> only we could determine how to assign values to years that were "good" and
> those that were not.
>
> The nation may not be collectively holding its breath to know what you have
> to say, but at the moment, I am.
>
> > So here is the real problem: society does need some mechanism to make
> > decisions on grand questions, but it's not rational for the typical
> > member of society to become informed enough to have a meaningful opinion
> > on these matters.  So what do we do?  Well, one thing that happens is
> > in a democracy, politicians lose their jobs when things get worse, and
> > keep them when things get better.  This tends to happen whether it is
> > the politician's fault or not, which may seem unjust.  But it does give
> > them incentives to try to keep things getting better.  That's not such
> > a bad way to run a world.