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

Gregory Lewis gjlewis37 at gmail.com
Sun Jun 5 15:40:06 UTC 2016


(Apologies if I recapitulate things well-known to cognoscenti - by the
history of this email list, I'm a recent entrant)

Is there also a 'damping' consideration here? In effect constitutions and
other mechanisms lock in the preferences of the past against the future
(e.g. super-majoritarian requirements for amendment, etc.) This obviously
hinders correcting the errors of the past, but may be a useful barrier
against errors of the future. Britain has all manner of anachronisms which
don't survive contemporary scrutiny, but perhaps the general inertia of the
political system has been helpful to ensure a few hundred years of peaceful
and stable government.

Even if you're pretty whiggish (which I'm guessing Extropians generally
are.) about social progress over time, you might still want to have some
institutional conservatism as we approximate better and better the 'right
system', as newer innovations are more likely to be error.

I wonder if some mathsy political scientists have tried to quantify these
effects?

Enjoy life,

 

Gregory

 

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of Anders
Sent: 05 June 2016 07:45
To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
Subject: Re: [ExI] political disaster was: request to tone down politics

 

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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