[ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors?

[Anders Sandberg]

Darren Greer wrote:
>
>     Anders wrote:
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>
>  
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>     It could be that Didier Sornette is right about the singularity as
>     an infinite sequence of ever faster stock market crashes and
>     rallies converging to a single point...
>
>
> I find it interesting that Marx and Engels predicated all of this in 
> the section on capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. 
> The descriptions of it as a revolutionary force creating periodic 
> crisis within the system and needing to create new markets or exploit 
> old ones to right itself. And that line about the executive of the 
> state becoming servants to the bourgeois class as a whole. 

That is not what Sornette talks about. His model suggests that *any* 
economic system (presumably even perfect communism) has this crisis 
singularity. Whether you believe the model is another matter (IMHO it is 
based on *weird* assumptions and completely ignores the details of the 
system, but at least it makes testable predictions - he has started a 
"stock market crash observatory" that actually logs predictions and 
checks whether they come true).

Capitalism has proven amazingly resilient because it has incentives to 
reinvent itself. A bit like the Internet, a system whose imminent 
collapse has been predicted regularly since 1980. Institutions that 
create disincentives to self-innovation, they are the ones that cause 
trouble (case in point, of cours, the socialist states).

>  I have a feeling this is because we haven't fully acknowledged as a 
> society that these systems are even there, that they have grafted 
> themselves onto our way of perceiving and dealing with the world. So 
> we sit here and wait for a hero or two to rescue us like we are 
> damsels in distress in some medieval tale published 
> by enlightenment age presses in 1895. In a way we are all a bit like 
> Don Quixotes, with our politicians and business leaders Sancho Panzas. 
> Everyone is deluded, but some are slightly more practical than others.

Exactly! And people prefer politics (just like novels) that is about 
people, not abstract systems.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University