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

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Samantha,

On 2/25/2011 1:12 PM, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> I have a design in mind for an open end survey and matching system 
> that the above sort of reminds me of.

This is very great and exciting news to me.  So many people have said 
exactly this to me.  I would love to here more on this.  Would it be 
driven bottom up or top down (i.e. filtered/censored)?  What is your 
motivation for such?  How would it work?  Would it encourage as much 
consensus as possible (like having a way to push less important 
disagreeable things to sub camps)?  If so, then how?  What are some 
specific examples of results that would exist if such were created and 
used?....  Please tell us more.

> On 02/24/2011 09:09 PM, Brent Allsop wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Are you assuming that this collective state of mind is particularly 
> rational or a good [enough] decision maker?   Why would you assume 
> that when experience seems to show that relatively few people are 
> reasonably sane and competent about a great number of questions?

The fact that still so relatively few people are morally reasonable, 
morally educated, to any level above moral insanity is precisely the 
problem.   The closest thing to any moral education or reference to 
moral information, or direction we have today for the masses is 
primitive scriptures or hierarchical institutions claiming to get moral 
direction through one top man directly from god.  I think we all agree 
how morally insane and bottle necked that is.  That is why everything 
today is so war and hate based and why we still value rotting everyone 
in the grave.

All these primitive hierarchies have evolved in a survival of the 
fittest way.  Nobody listens to any other hierarchy, and instead build 
walls and demonizes and attempt to frustrate, destroy, and convert all 
of them as much as possible.  There are very distinct walls that 
separate everyone. That is why we still have war, both violent and non.  
Its all because there is zero communication.

What we need, is to find some way to recognize or quantitatively measure 
for who the moral experts are.  And this determination method should be 
based or chosen by each individual.  Then you need to find some 
consensus building way to have as many of those experts as possible 
collaboratively develop concise descriptions and arguments for the 
various competing moral theories.  Then you need to come up with some 
rigorous way to measure for expert consensus, by these moral experts, 
amongst the competing moral theories.  In other words, each individual 
can select who they think are the best moral experts (i.e. select a 
canonization or filtering algorithm on their own) and then see what 
their chosen experts believe is the current state of the art of the most 
moral theory.

Having all the competing theories, and arguments for such, together in 
one open and unbiased place, with quantitative measures of who is in 
what camp, or who wants what, can finally be a source of moral  
education reference material for the masses.  It will finally be a way 
for everyone to communicate, and find out what EVERYONE still wants in a 
way where we have as our goal to get all of it, not just what our 
particular hierarchy wants (while building walls, frustrating and waring 
against everything else).

Because of the lack of good moral educational sources, everyone tends 
not to think to much about morals.  Without thinking about them much, 
people fall into Luddite, primitive, and traditional morals, like 
rotting people in the grave, and tend to fear progress of any kind.  If 
they were forced to think about it a bit more, if they were asked or 
expected to explicitly specify which moral hypothesis they are currently 
working with, and why, and have a good unbiased source of expert based 
educational reference material to help them make that choice, their 
moral expertise could finally start progressing at the rate of other 
technologies.  If you make people responsible for the moral theories 
they are working with, they would take much more responsibility for 
being more morally educated, and supporting increasingly improving morals.

Of course, there is usually a set of leading moral experts that are in 
the minority, and think differently than the still primitive majority.  
The problem is, their signal is being drowned out from all the noise on 
the internet from the traditional masses.  You can't tell the 
brilliantly leading moral loner from the simply still insane loner.  You 
end up with something like 20k publications on theories of consciousness 
in Chalmers' bibliography of 'scientific journals'.  Hidden deep within 
that pile, is some real good scientific consensus information which a 
few of the leading experts are barely able to make out.  The problem is, 
the masses can't discern the great expert scientific consensus contained 
in that pile of junk.  And if any expert claimed there was a consensus, 
everyone in a still primitive camp would simply doubt such.  You need 
some way for the experts to collaboratively work together to come up 
with concise agreed on theory descriptions, using state of the art 
agreed on terminology, and some rigorous way to measure for how much 
expert consensus there is for each in a way each individual can trusts 
in his own way

And as these moral experts that really know, can collaborate and work 
together and can monitor how the popular consensus believes and is or is 
not changing, compared to the expert consensus that really knows, you 
measure the progress they are making.  Even the experts must know, 
concicely and quanitatively, what everyone else believes, so all the 
experts can colaberate and help.  When you find an argument, or 
scientific result that starts to work at falsifying immoral theories 
(i.e. converting people to morally better camps) you focus on those 
things that work.  That which you measure will always improve.  You 
can't improve if you can't measure your progress, and find out how 
convincing any argument, or demonstrable scientific evidence, you are 
using  or may find, works.

>
>> 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?
>>
>
> That is a system of strong individual rights.  It is not democracy as 
> in democracy your wishes and rights can always be overridden by a 
> majority.

Again, it is because of the hate based censoring, filtering, and 
demonizing nature of our hierarchical survival of the fittest 
organizations with walls around them, that we suffer from this so much.  
We need to have a system where there are no walls, no censoring - where 
everyone can express what they want, and what they still believe, a 
place where nothing is filtered, especially that of the leading minority 
moral experts.  Then we need to teach everyone the immorality and 
primitive devilishness of hating, or seeking to destroy, in any way, 
what anyone else wants, especially minority people.  We need to have a 
system that values and rewards all differences, especially minority 
differences.

>> 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?
>
> They should leave it alone.
>
There is nothing we can do to help?  Surely trying to force them to be 
like us isn't good.  But if we can know, concisely and quantitatively, 
and in an their selected expert based way, what the people want, can we 
not then do all we can to help them get that?   Getting them what they 
want first, while still keeping them educated about what we might rather 
have them be like or what we want also, as a secondary after what they 
want, priority...?

>> 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.
>
> In actuality it doesn't happen.  Central decision making everyone has 
> to obey even if they are an outlier with a better idea is inherently 
> broken.  Such can at best provide general guidance.  It can never have 
> enough capacity to outperform localized decision making.  You cannot 
> construct a good centralized or expert run system  generally that will 
> retain its good qualities or have good qualities if it grows to be the 
> "decider" for too many things which it enforces using force.

With an expert based, educational, open survey system nobody 'has' to do 
anything.  It is all entirely volunteer driven, everyone that wants the 
same thing working together in crowd sourced collaboration to get it 
way, while ensuring they are aware of and valuing, and seeking not to 
get in the way of what anyone else wants, especially minorities, as much 
as possible.

Also, as far as effectiveness and speed go, people always assume a 
hierarchical institutions can change directions faster than any network 
based system.  But, for the networked based system where their are 
entirely different hierarchies of delegated experts for each individual 
moral issue (natural division/networking of powers, and if anyone screws 
up, their hard won hierarchy of constituents vanishes instantly) just 
the opposite is the case.  I've described in a short fiction story how 
this can be so or how a network managed system can make an expert based 
decision for the entire organization to change on a dime, much more 
efficiently and rapidly, with near instantaneous 100% by in and 
consensus building,  than any hierarchical one. (see: 
http://canonizer.com/files/Meat_Supplier_Decision_at_Future_Burger.doc )


>>
>> 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?
>
> How do you, John Q. Public, know who those "experts" are?

See above.  You need to have a better way to be morally educated, and to 
measure how educated you are, and take responsibility for such...

>
>> What is the moral expert consensus?
See above.  It is based on each individual having the ability to select 
who they think the moral experts are, in a delegated tree of moral 
expertise way.  It is rigorously measured and tracked...

>
> Define "moral".  We cannot find the above without such a definition.
>

Anything anyone truly wants has moral value.  Everyone should seek after 
all of that, the more diversity the better.  The most important first 
step is knowing all this concisely and quantitatively, then if you 
aren't interested in what someone else wants, at least be aware of it, 
and acknowledge it (i.e. don't build a wall, or censor it) so you can 
avoid frustrating it, so you can work with it, help it, include it, and 
love it, as much as possible.


>>   What is the scientific consensus? 
See above.

>
> Are you sure consensus strongly approximates best?
That which is best, is what everyone wants.  And the more morally 
educated people are, and the more you explicitly declare and measure for 
such, in an accept responsibility way, the better moral choosers 
everyone will become

>
>
>> What is the transhumanist consensus?  If you can know that, suddenly 
>> there is no more reason for war and fighting.
>
> False.  There will be dissenting viewpoints.  If they have no space to 
> doing things their way that is a cause for conflict.
Hopefully, I've completely answered this question above.

>
>>    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?
>>
>
> Build you own walled community with people that you find sane.  Don't 
> expect to convert the world or get the consensus to do anything but 
> run over you.

To me, this is anti social hate.  I have the same problem with people 
that think all socialist should move to China, or something.  This kind 
of hate and lack of diversity is the entire problem.  We've got to have 
more interaction, support, inter group communication, where everyone 
seeks to tear down all walls, everyone seeks to get everything for 
everyone, all together.  Not build a wall, push everyone different 
outside, and seek to frustrate everything outside it, or at best just 
"leave it alone".

>
> Canonizer was an interesting idea but the implementation is too weak/ 
> not so useful.  I am not sure what could be better or if some of its 
> goals are doable.

What, specifically, are it's weaknesses?  It is obviously still a work 
in progress, and if anyone can come up with something better, where I 
can say what I want, where I can find all who agree with me in a 
consensus building way, and we will not be filtered even though we are a 
minority, and I can select who I think the experts are, ...  I will 
quickly jump camps to whatever that system is.

>
> I don't give a fig what "everyone wants".   Really.

This is totally shocking to me.   I had no idea the extent of this moral 
hypothesis everyone is still working with.  If this canonizer project 
has taught me anything, it is this - that most people still could care 
less about what everyone wants.  They hate it, they loath it, they want 
to push it outside their wall, and at best just want to ingore it or 
'leave it alone'  They only care about what they, themselves, want.  
They never seek to know what others are saying or believing, whether 
mistaken or not.  They have no interest in measuring how much they might 
be progressing, or not, with others, and why, they just seek to write 
their own blog and shout it out from behind this wall, who cares how 
many people by into what they are saying.  They have no interest in 
knowing, concisely or quantitatively, what all the other blogs are saying.

In the transhumanist community, everyone is individuals with huge walls 
around themselves.  If anyone outside their wall starts getting some 
power, or any kind of consensus, or any size of co-operating group, they 
descend to ever less important levels where they can find some 
disagreement and focus on that with eternal yes, no, yes, no, we can't 
have strawberry, chocolate is the only way eternally repeated 
arguments.  Everyone being blind to how much consensus there is, after 
all, on the most important issues.  They just seek to destroy and 
frustrate or convert all of that at the lowest possible trivial level, 
as much as possible, in the survival of the fittest way we've all been 
evolved to think is best.

I have faith and hope that we can all do much better, and that we can 
finally find a way to help everyone's, including the still morally 
backwards', morals start improving and keeping up with our technologies.

Samantha, thank you so much for responding.  For communicating with me 
what your thoughts and concerns are.  Thank you for asking questions.  
Thank you for not ignoring me and for wanting to help me.  Thank you for 
not putting up a wall and censoring me (the WTA list censored my initial 
post with no explanation provided.)

Brent Allsop