[ExI] Critiquing democracy

[Cesar Garcia Saez]

I've been wondering for a long time for an approach similar to the Partido
Azar, or Random Party. Their proposal is that the best representation of
society is not professional politicians, but a random selection of people,
than has to work as politicians for a mandate and then can't be re-elected
again.

The random selection process is always the tricky part of the discussion
but there might be means to get it right.

You can check the website here http://www.partidoazar.com/ - Spanish site
only

Best,
César

>Michael Anissimov?<michaelanissimov at gmail.com>?, 5/3/2015 8:12 AM:


>We're programmed to think that anything other than democracy is tyranny,
but that's not >historically accurate.


>I think Brin put it best in "The Transparent Society" where he outlined
why *open societies* are >the important thing. We want and need open-ended,
self-correcting societies where citizens can >have their own life projects.?


>Democracy is one way to approach this, but it is a formal/administrative
solution, not a >guarantee - there are plenty of closed democracies that
have all the formal routines of >democracy but do not allow citizens to
actually point out what is wrong, hold officeholders >accountable, and get
rid of them or non-functional institutions if needed. One can well imagine
>non-democratic but open societies; however, any such proposal better
demonstrate how it can >handle self-correction better than democracy.
Invoking technocrats or other groups of >professional correctors is not
enough, since they both have a tendency to be subverted and, as >Brin
eloquently points out, actual societal error correction requires a very
broad set of eyes >scrutinizing what is going on - if the man on the street
cannot point out something being corrupt >(including the anti-corruption
task force), then corruption is bound to take over.?

>This is particularly important from an xrisk perspective. The biggest
human-caused disasters >>(wars, democides) have occurred because of
government power: we should be *extremely* >careful about how we set up
these potentially non-friendly artificial intelligences. Lock-in effects
>of bad government choices have massive intergenerational costs.?



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