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

Sun Jun 5 16:14:16 UTC 2016

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 10:42 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>> >
>> To an outsider it is obvious that the US should update its constitution.
>> But I guess that is not likely, is it?
>
>
> > 
> Oh?  What do you suggest?  The electoral college for one, I suppose.
>

Yes. I see no reason why a voter in 
Wyoming
 should have 66.7 times more power over deciding who gets to be a senator
than a voter in California, or why the Wyoming guy should have 18.3 times
more power in choosing the next president than the California guy.  It's
nuts. Voters should be allowed to vote for more than one person and whoever
gets the most votes wins. That way libertarians could vote for
Johnson
AND Trump and I could vote for Johnson AND Hillary. And it would
eliminate the need for runoff elections.

It's far more controversial and it's never going to happen but I'd like to
see freedom of religion removed from the constitution because it's
redundant. As long as you've got freedom of speech and freedom of assembly
you've got freedom of religion automatically; but when you specifically
mention one particular thing you can do with
freedom of speech and freedom of assembly
 it's used to justify situations where if I do something for religious
reasons then it's legal but if I do the exact same thing for non-religious
reasons then it's illegal. And that is also nuts.

 John K Clark

> But that's rather esoteric for most people.
>
> bill w
>
> On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 1:45 AM, Anders <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
>> 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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>>
>
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