this would be much closer to the Pareto frontier then our curren social organization! unfortunately, this is NOT how society work. if you will operate like that, you will loss almost all your resources.
but it’s more complicated then that—why not gate this on cooperation? why should i give 1 dollar for 2 of someone else dollars, when they will not do that for me?
and this is why all this scheme doesn’t work. every such plan need to account for defectors, and it doesn’t look like you address it, anywhere.
on the issue of politics—most people who involve in politics make things worse. before declaring that it’s people duty to do something, it’s important to verify this is net-positive thing to do. if i look on people involved in politics and decide that less politics would have been better to society, then my duty is to NOT get involved in politics. or at least, not to get involved more then the level that i believe is the right level of involvement.
but… i really don’t see how all this politics even connected to the first half of the post, about the right ratio of my utility : other person utility?
Good points! I didn’t get into ‘How do you really calculate the net-societal utility outcome of your actions, including second+ order effects?’ since I think even the 1st order immediate consequence calculation is intractable.
In practice you shouldn’t … help people that will do harm with your help. I think this is one of the limits of pacifism(with Kaladin’s dad being an example of that, incidentally) at some point passive obedience to an unjust opressor has the same consequences for the other people they harm as active cooperation. It is a moral duty to actually do something to harm or at least minimally help a person or institution or government from doing bad things. Just saying I don’t like what this Hitler guy is doing with my tax money isn’t really acceptable once the harm he’s causing becomes really monstrous. So if I’m really calculating paying 2 personal utility to generate 4 utility for Bob, I should take into account what Bob’s actually gonna do with his 4 utility. But again that becomes computationally impossible almost immediately, hence we use heuristics(aka moral principles) to dictate how we should behave.
By politics I mean governance, collective action via voluntary organisations and state action.
The connection seems clear to me: I want to pool resources with others in a way that makes all of us better off. Increasingly elaborate and large scale systems of social coordination is how we do that and that’s what modern states are. (for better or for worse and as hijacked by niche, elite special interests as they can seem to be and/or actually are)
As … disappointing as contemporary western governments are, I still think most ‘charity’ or utility redistribution in modern societies is done by government via schools, healthcare, pensions, police and other security systems and relatively cheap/free infrastructure. These are all things that were privileges or luxuries in the past that are now baseline and we all pay for them together.
The modern idea is that politics is dirty and gross. And pretty much any politician I can think of off the top of my head is at best disappointing, at worst vile. However, developed societies went from feudal serfdom or slavery or highly unequal large underclass early industrial society to modern social democratic welfare states with a historically relatively high standard of living even for the worst off(or at least for the almost worst off, the really lumpenproletariat among us aren’t doing that great, but the people at the bottom 15% threshold are, relatively speaking).
This transformation happened because people, not necessarily professional politicians but some were that as well, pushed for change in an intentional, organised and persistent way. And they got it.
The grossness of modern politicians is a problem that will either be solved by better politicians emerging or will destroy our societies. Crap elites kill civilizations.
Without organised, collective action towards the goal of improving our lives in specific ways, with specific policies … we won’t get the things we want. Society doesn’t get better randomly, it gets better because groups of people agitate in a direction they think will make it better and sometimes they get what they want and sometimes what they wanted actually was a good idea.
this would be much closer to the Pareto frontier then our curren social organization! unfortunately, this is NOT how society work. if you will operate like that, you will loss almost all your resources.
but it’s more complicated then that—why not gate this on cooperation? why should i give 1 dollar for 2 of someone else dollars, when they will not do that for me?
and this is why all this scheme doesn’t work. every such plan need to account for defectors, and it doesn’t look like you address it, anywhere.
on the issue of politics—most people who involve in politics make things worse. before declaring that it’s people duty to do something, it’s important to verify this is net-positive thing to do. if i look on people involved in politics and decide that less politics would have been better to society, then my duty is to NOT get involved in politics. or at least, not to get involved more then the level that i believe is the right level of involvement.
but… i really don’t see how all this politics even connected to the first half of the post, about the right ratio of my utility : other person utility?
Good points! I didn’t get into ‘How do you really calculate the net-societal utility outcome of your actions, including second+ order effects?’ since I think even the 1st order immediate consequence calculation is intractable.
In practice you shouldn’t … help people that will do harm with your help. I think this is one of the limits of pacifism(with Kaladin’s dad being an example of that, incidentally) at some point passive obedience to an unjust opressor has the same consequences for the other people they harm as active cooperation. It is a moral duty to actually do something to harm or at least minimally help a person or institution or government from doing bad things. Just saying I don’t like what this Hitler guy is doing with my tax money isn’t really acceptable once the harm he’s causing becomes really monstrous. So if I’m really calculating paying 2 personal utility to generate 4 utility for Bob, I should take into account what Bob’s actually gonna do with his 4 utility. But again that becomes computationally impossible almost immediately, hence we use heuristics(aka moral principles) to dictate how we should behave.
By politics I mean governance, collective action via voluntary organisations and state action.
The connection seems clear to me: I want to pool resources with others in a way that makes all of us better off. Increasingly elaborate and large scale systems of social coordination is how we do that and that’s what modern states are. (for better or for worse and as hijacked by niche, elite special interests as they can seem to be and/or actually are)
As … disappointing as contemporary western governments are, I still think most ‘charity’ or utility redistribution in modern societies is done by government via schools, healthcare, pensions, police and other security systems and relatively cheap/free infrastructure. These are all things that were privileges or luxuries in the past that are now baseline and we all pay for them together.
The modern idea is that politics is dirty and gross. And pretty much any politician I can think of off the top of my head is at best disappointing, at worst vile. However, developed societies went from feudal serfdom or slavery or highly unequal large underclass early industrial society to modern social democratic welfare states with a historically relatively high standard of living even for the worst off(or at least for the almost worst off, the really lumpenproletariat among us aren’t doing that great, but the people at the bottom 15% threshold are, relatively speaking).
This transformation happened because people, not necessarily professional politicians but some were that as well, pushed for change in an intentional, organised and persistent way. And they got it.
The grossness of modern politicians is a problem that will either be solved by better politicians emerging or will destroy our societies. Crap elites kill civilizations.
Without organised, collective action towards the goal of improving our lives in specific ways, with specific policies … we won’t get the things we want. Society doesn’t get better randomly, it gets better because groups of people agitate in a direction they think will make it better and sometimes they get what they want and sometimes what they wanted actually was a good idea.