[ExI] political disaster was: request to tone down politics

Anders anders at aleph.se
Sun Jun 5 06:45:01 UTC 2016


On 2016-06-05 00:03, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> Still, trying to steer towards extropian themes: the way of handling 
> disasters is to (1) avoid them happening, (2) make actions during the 
> event to mitigate damage, and (3) have good recovery options. It might 
> be interesting to analyse the problem of political systems going into 
> headspins this way. anders
>
> Russia has been dysfunctional for nearly 100 years.  Surely they have 
> tried to tweak the system many times, to no avail.  Why don't they 
> change?  Why don't Cuba and North Korea, seeing as how these countries 
> are in permanent disaster?  Is it just that they are ruled by 
> strongmen who control the military?

Blaming political ideology does not work as an explanation, since they 
were not exactly in a great state before shifting to socialism (Russia a 
collapsing monarchy, Cuba an authoritarian dictatorship, North Korea 
occupied by the Japanese and Soviet Union). Plus, other basket cases 
like Haiti has never been socialist.

Now, I know political science has a fair bit of knowledge and theory 
about why dysfunction tends to run deep. One clear issue is that 
institutions tend to be weak and untrustworthy, the incentives for 
rulers and ruled are such that corruption and distrust (or even outright 
theft) becomes rational. Some failure modes involve tribalist politics, 
making joint government hard.

To an outsider it is obvious that the US should update its constitution. 
But I guess that is not likely, is it?

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

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