We (and I mostly mean the US, where I’m located) seem to design our culture and our government in an incredibly convoluted, haphazard and error-prone way. No thought is given to the long-run consequences or the stability of our political decisions.
It’s interesting to me that it looks that way to you, given that the architects of the American system (James Madison, John Jay etc...) where explicitly attempting to achieve a kind of “defense in depth” (e.g. separation of powers between the branches, federalism with independent states, decentralized militia system, etc...). Perhaps they failed in their attempt, or perhaps “backup plans for backup plans” just appear convoluted and wasteful when viewed by those living inside such systems.
Discussion of whether “punishment” is even a useful concept from the government-level perspective or whether the goal should always be reduction in future crime.
more broadly, to what degree ought a government promote any specific framework of morality, v.s. preserve the space for society at large to explore.
i happen to mostly agree with you on those broad ideals. a large space full of constant experimentation allows for regularly finding better ways of doing things: American dynamism in a nutshell.
Abortion comes to mind as an example of a moral question that the government has to legislate on.
yes, and no. abortion is relevant to a government because most governments promise a specific set of rights to their citizens which must be defended, and one of these rights is protection from violence. it’s reasonable for a government to approach abortion strictly from the angle of “at what moment(s) in human development do we grant humans their citizenship.” as with the question of justice, the decision-making here could be guided by processes which are either closely tied to morality (“life is sacred; citizenship is granted at conception”) or less directly related to morals (“for the good of the country, citizenship should be granted once the expected gains from providing it outweigh the cost”).
in a competitive landscape, one might expect selective pressures to optimize for the latter interpretation. in fact, if one understands morality to be a thing which emerged in the context of social cooperation, one might expect the individual’s moral view to yield similar results to the amoral view of decision making — and that significant disagreements at that level are due to radical changes in the human experience since roughly the agricultural revolution, where the optimal methods of cooperation began to shift at a rate that challenged the ability for morals to match. but this is me shooting loosely-formed ideas from the hip here: i’ve never looked into the history of morality and it could easily exist for reasons other than facilitating social cooperation.
You seem to be assuming that nations / governments are desirable in the first place. I actually would strongly disagree. There has to be law, but there does not necessarily have to be government. That is: if you start as I do from the assumption (I probably should make a post about this, though I’m not sure anyone on LessWrong cares to read me pontificate about my ethical system) that people have the right to do as they will as long as they avoid to the best of their ability infringing on this same right in others, then it derives pretty quickly that imposing a set of laws on someone which they did not assent to knowingly is immoral.
Society ought imo to be organized from the bottom up as a complex of freely agreed upon contracts between individuals and groups (in the vein of individualist anarchism—communist anarchism is simply the special case where a group of individuals have agreed to form a commune), and if there is any top-down power, it ought to be one whose sole function is to enforce contracts—this is what I think an ASI should do.
So although I agree with you that constructing better societies is a very important thing to do—in fact it’s probably the thing I’m most interested in putting my time and energy into—I disagree that they have to look anything like nationstates. The separation between law and economics ideally ought to be minuscule. (Note: I am not referring to so-called anarcho-capitalism here. In the absence of coercion from a pre-existing nationstate no one would freely agree to be a wage slave, or to respect the right of a landlord to own a building they do not personally live in, etc.)
It’s interesting to me that it looks that way to you, given that the architects of the American system (James Madison, John Jay etc...) where explicitly attempting to achieve a kind of “defense in depth” (e.g. separation of powers between the branches, federalism with independent states, decentralized militia system, etc...). Perhaps they failed in their attempt, or perhaps “backup plans for backup plans” just appear convoluted and wasteful when viewed by those living inside such systems.
more broadly, to what degree ought a government promote any specific framework of morality, v.s. preserve the space for society at large to explore.
i happen to mostly agree with you on those broad ideals. a large space full of constant experimentation allows for regularly finding better ways of doing things: American dynamism in a nutshell.
yes, and no. abortion is relevant to a government because most governments promise a specific set of rights to their citizens which must be defended, and one of these rights is protection from violence. it’s reasonable for a government to approach abortion strictly from the angle of “at what moment(s) in human development do we grant humans their citizenship.” as with the question of justice, the decision-making here could be guided by processes which are either closely tied to morality (“life is sacred; citizenship is granted at conception”) or less directly related to morals (“for the good of the country, citizenship should be granted once the expected gains from providing it outweigh the cost”).
in a competitive landscape, one might expect selective pressures to optimize for the latter interpretation. in fact, if one understands morality to be a thing which emerged in the context of social cooperation, one might expect the individual’s moral view to yield similar results to the amoral view of decision making — and that significant disagreements at that level are due to radical changes in the human experience since roughly the agricultural revolution, where the optimal methods of cooperation began to shift at a rate that challenged the ability for morals to match. but this is me shooting loosely-formed ideas from the hip here: i’ve never looked into the history of morality and it could easily exist for reasons other than facilitating social cooperation.
Fellow Rimworld enjoyer here, thoroughly enjoyed your well thought out idea :)
You seem to be assuming that nations / governments are desirable in the first place. I actually would strongly disagree. There has to be law, but there does not necessarily have to be government. That is: if you start as I do from the assumption (I probably should make a post about this, though I’m not sure anyone on LessWrong cares to read me pontificate about my ethical system) that people have the right to do as they will as long as they avoid to the best of their ability infringing on this same right in others, then it derives pretty quickly that imposing a set of laws on someone which they did not assent to knowingly is immoral.
Society ought imo to be organized from the bottom up as a complex of freely agreed upon contracts between individuals and groups (in the vein of individualist anarchism—communist anarchism is simply the special case where a group of individuals have agreed to form a commune), and if there is any top-down power, it ought to be one whose sole function is to enforce contracts—this is what I think an ASI should do.
So although I agree with you that constructing better societies is a very important thing to do—in fact it’s probably the thing I’m most interested in putting my time and energy into—I disagree that they have to look anything like nationstates. The separation between law and economics ideally ought to be minuscule. (Note: I am not referring to so-called anarcho-capitalism here. In the absence of coercion from a pre-existing nationstate no one would freely agree to be a wage slave, or to respect the right of a landlord to own a building they do not personally live in, etc.)
Ah! Sorry for being nitpicky then. I understand what you mean now. And I agree!