[ExI] Easy solution to wars like that in Libya, and in these groups?

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at canonizer.com
Fri Feb 25 05:09:08 UTC 2011


Extropians,

It seems to me that if you could some way have an easy way to reliably, 
easily, and in real time, know concisely and quantitatively, what the 
entire population of Libya wanted, war could easily be avoided.  Why do 
we all have to spend so much effort protesting before anyone finally 
gets a clue as to what the people want?  If you could easily know, 
concicely and quantitatively what everyone wanted, obviously, if the 
leader was diviating from this, especially if he wanted to kill anyone, 
everyone could just ignore him, and just do what the people wanted, 
instead, couldn't they?  Problem solved?  Does anyone think differently?

Everyone is asking the question, what should the US, and other countries 
do, to help out Libya and similarly struggling countries?  Why is 
everyone only asking or talking to the leaders, at the tops of all the 
hierarchies, and if that one is taken out, find another.  Is nobody 
interested in what the people of Libya want?  Isn't that the only problem?

Of course, primitive survey systems, like simple voting, or checking 1 
of 4 possible choices doesn't work very well, and is so difficult.  Who 
gets to decide what the 4 choices are, and what they mean?  You need 
some kind of open survey system that is set up in a way that is 
constantly improving, bottom up, and one that will build as much 
consensus as possible (pushing the banal disagreeable stuff to lower 
camps - out of the way), and follow that consensus as it morphs into the 
future and jumps away from falsified camps, to far better ones....

And it needs to be some kind of expert based system.  So uneducated 
people in a particular field can easily delegate their vote / support, 
to someone they trust more than themselves.  And that delegatee can do 
the same to someone else, and so on... so the real experts at the top of 
such trees can make much more educated choices than all the clueless 
idiots...

And of course, all transhumanists are just one big group of individuals 
all waring and criticizing each other on the most trivial details, and 
we never get anything done at all, and never have any influence over 
anything.  But I bet you if we had the right consensus building system 
(where the trivial less important disagreeable stuff we spend all our 
time on could be pushed to lower level camps), all the real moral and 
scientific experts at the tops of such delegated tree structures, would 
be far more transhumanist than the general clueless population.  With 
such a system dictating the morals of society, (rather than all the 
primitive war mongering bottle necked hierarchies) and telling us what 
our priorities are and so on.  I bet we could rule the world and finally 
bring the singularity to pass.

My hypothosis is that it is all simply a matter of communication.  How 
do you know what the best experts in the crowd want, concisely and 
quantitatively?  What is the moral expert consensus?  What is the 
scientific consensus?  What is the transhumanist consensus?  If you can 
know that, suddenly there is no more reason for war and fighting.   This 
hypothesis has led me to try building something like canonizer.com, but 
everyone seems to hate it, and like everything else, everyone just wants 
to criticize, fight it and destroy it, and go back to doing everything 
on their own in a do it yourself lonely way - damn everyone else.  So 
maybe someone can come up with some kind of better method of knowing 
what all us experts want, concisely and quantitatively, in any kind of 
consensus building way, so maybe we can work together and get something 
done, other than just finding disagreeable things and focusing and 
criticizing everything and everyone on that, as we continue to watch the 
world still wallow in primitive rotting misery?

We just buried our mother in law.  Despite my obvious horror, I couldn't 
even talk about it, the family just put her in the grave to rot.  Yes, 
she is the one I told you about that was asking me about transhumanism 
the other day.  But that is about as far as she got.  I'm getting tired 
of rotting these people in the grave and sitting around watching as if 
we can do nothing.  I just want to know what all you experts believe is 
best, and want to get to work on doing it all, together.  We obviously 
still aren't getting much done as lone individuals.  Can we not do more 
than just spending an eternity in eternal yes no arguments over such 
things as Libertarianism vs what, over and over again, year after year 
after year, for now more than 20 years?  Lets just find some way to 
definitively state what everyone wants, concisely and quantitatively, 
and finally just get started on doing it all, for everyone.

Brent Allsop







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