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On 2016-05-15 18:18, spike wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><span
style="color:windowtext">>…</span>Cool. And mildly
frightening<span style="color:windowtext">… Anders</span></p>
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I was refering to disagreeing with Spike as mildly frightening, but
sure, crazy presidents also belong in that category :-)<br>
<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><span
style="color:windowtext">So what if…the internet goes down
that day, or some important portion of it, and now America
does not know the rightful legal custodian of all those
fireworks? What if there is an ambiguous outcome and the
electoral college convenes, then perfectly legally hands us
a third candidate?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><span
style="color:windowtext">Anders, being an outsider and black
swan expert, your take on this will likely be most
enlightening.</span><br>
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<br>
The key thing is trust. That is what holds societies together, not
communications nor money. If there is trouble and confusion, will
you trust your neighbour? Or the local authority figure? Or other
institutions? It seems to me that the US is suffering a pretty big
breakdown of trust in federal institutions, although it is hard to
tell how much that is actual distrust and how much is venting. It is
harder to tell what the trust levels in civil society is, since it
is fairly inhomogeneous in the US. But overall my impression is that
it is actually fairly OK compared to many other places.<br>
<br>
If the net goes down on election day, you will have a lot of
institutions scrambling for restoring legitimate structure. Some
will be at odds by accident or design. Believing they will fail to
come up with workable solutions suggests a rather serious distrust
of them. But that is not the same as actual reasons to think they
will fail. Compare to thinking that the engineers and sysadmins will
fail at restoring the Internet after a serious error: does that
(less political) scenario sound likely? Sure, we can construct
scenarios where it happens, but do we really think those scenarios
have the bulk of probability?<br>
<br>
My outside perspective is that the US is a loud, messy democracy
with some unhealthy polarisation and obsession with the
constitution, but also fairly competent political engineers and a
way stronger civil society than many other western states. Just like
how courts often sidestep what seems to be deep technological or
logical problems by using rough but kind of common sense praxis,
that messy system is actually quite robust to even severe challenges
as long as the core trust is good enough. <br>
<br>
Your (and many others) disquiet is perhaps not driven by evidence of
maliciousness or incompetence, but rather a feeling that DC (and
many other governments) is not really legitimate anymore. If it does
not represent you in the proper way, then it is a frightening,
dangerous behemoth. If it is really true that general trust is too
low, then it might be fragile to a disturbance. But the real problem
remains the lack of trust-building legitimacy: no amount of risk
management can fix that.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University</pre>
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