I wrote 1843 words in response, but it was a bad essay.
This is a from-scratch second draft focused on linking the specifics of the FDA to the thing I actually care about, which is the platonic form of the Good, and its manifestation in the actual world.
The problem is that I’m basically an albigenisian, or cathar, or manichian, in that I believe that there is a logically coherent thing called Goodness and that it is mostly not physically realized in our world and our world’s history.
Most governments are very far from a “Good shape”, and one of the ways that they are far from this shape is that they actively resist being put into a Good shape.
The US in 1820 was very unusually good compared to most historically available comparison objects but that’s not saying very much since most governments, in general, are conspiracies of powerful evil men collaborating to fight with each other marginally less than they otherwise would fight in the absence of their traditional conflict minimization procedures, thus forming a localized cartel that runs a regional protection racket.
The FDA is thus a locally insoluble instance of a muchmuch larger problem.
From December 2019 to February 2022 the nearly universal failure of most governments to adequately handle the covid crisis made the “generalized evil-or-incompetent state” of nearly all worldy governments salient to the common person.
In that period, by explaining in detail how the FDA (and NIH and OSHA and CDC and so on) contributed to the catastrophe, there was a teachable moment regarding the general tragedy facing the general world.
The general problem can be explained in several ways, but one way to explain it is that neither Putin nor Hamas are that different from most governments.
They are different in magnitude and direction… they are different from other governments in who specifically they officially treat as an outgroup, and how strong they are. (All inner parties are inner parties, however.)
Since Putin and Hamas clearly would hurt you and me if they could do so profitably, but since they also obviously can’t hurt you and me, it is reasonably safe for you and me to talk about “how Putin and Hamas would be overthrown and replaced with non-Bad governance for their respective communities, and how this would be Good”.
From a distance, we can see that Putin is preying on the mothers and families and children of Russia, and we can see that Hamas is preying on the mothers and families and children of Palestine.
Basically, my argument is that every government is currently preying upon every group of people they rule, rather than serving those people, on net.
I’m opposed to death, I’m opposed to taxes, and I’m opposed to the FDA because the FDA is a sort of “tax” (regulations are a behavioral tax) that produces “death” (the lack of medical innovation unto a cure for death).
These are all similar and linked to me. They are vast nearly insoluble tragedies that almost no one is even willing to look at clearly and say “I cannot personally solve this right now, but if I could solve it then it would be worth solving.”
Not that there aren’t solutions! Logically, we haven’t ruled out solutions in full generality in public discussions yet!
I’m pretty sure (though not 100%) that “science doesn’t know for sure” that “benevolent government” is literally mathematically impossible. So I want to work on that! <3
However… in Palestine they don’t talk much in public about how to fix the problem that “Hamas exists in the way that it does” and in Russia they don’t talk much in public about how to fix that “Putin exists in the way that he does” and in China they don’t talk much in public about how to fix that “the CCP exists in the way that it does”, and so on...
The US, luckily, still has a modicum of “free speech” and so I’m allowed to say “All of our presidents are and have been basically evil” and I’m allowed to say “FDA delenda est” and I’m allowed to say “The Constitution legally enshrines legalized slavery for some, and that is bad, and until it changes we in the US should admit that the US is pretty darn evil. Our median voter functionally endorses slavery, and so our median voter is functionally a moral monster, and if we have any moral leaders then they are the kind of moral leader who will serve evil voters IN SPITE of the obvious evils.”
I don’t usually bring up “that the FDA is evil” very much anymore.
Covid is old news. The common man is forgetting and the zeitgeist has moved on.
Lately I’ve been falling back to the much broader and simpler idea that the US Constitution should be amended to simply remove the part of the 13th amendment that literally legalizes literal slavery.
This seems like a cleaner thing, that could easily fit within the five word limit.
And perhaps, after decades of legalisitic struggle, the US could change this one bad law to finally make slavery fully illegal?
But there are millions of bad laws.
Personally, I think the entire concept of government should be rederived from first principles from scratch and rebooted, as a sort of “backup fallback government” for the entire planet, with AI and blockshit, until all the old governments still exist, like the way there are still torture machines in museums of torture, but we just don’t use any of the old governments anymore.
But I’d aim for a state of affairs where instead of using the old governments, we would use things like a Justice API, and Local Barter Points, and a Council of DACs, and a Polyhive Senate Of Self Defense, and Open Source Parliamentarians (AIs built to represent humans within an Open Source Governance framework like in the backstory of Lady Of Mazes), and other weird new things?
Then at some point I’d expect that if most people on Earth looked at their local violence monopoly and had the thought “hey, I’m just not using this anymore” it would lead to waves, in various places, and due to various crises, of whole regions of Earth upgrading their subscriptions to the new system (maybe taking some oaths of mutual defense and signing up for a few new DACs) and then… we’d have something much much better without the drawbacks of the old stuff.
If such “fallback governance systems” had been designed and built in 2019, then I think covid would have caused such a natural phase transition for many countries, when previous systems had visibly and clearly lost the globalmandate of heaven.
And if or when such phase transitions occur, there would still be a question of whether the old system will continue to try to prey on the people voluntarily switching over to a new and better system...
And I think it is clear to me and most of my readers that no such reform plan is within any Overton Windowin sight...
...and maybe you therefore don’t think THIS could be a realistic way to make the FDA not exist in 2026 or 2028 or 2033 (or any other near term date)…
...but a cautious first principles reboot of the global order to address the numerous and obvious failures of the old order is currently the best I can currently come up with on BOTH the (1) realism and (2) goodness axes.
And while possible replacement system(s) for the government are still being designed, the only people I think it would be worth working with on this project are people who can independently notice that the FDA is evil, and independently notice that slavery is bad and also legal in the US (and also hopefully they can do math and have security mindset).
So, I still endorse “FDA delenda est” but I don’t think there’s a lot of point to beating that dead horse, or talking about the precise logistics of how to move deck chairs on the titanic around such that the FDA could be doing slightly less evil things while the ship sinks.
The ship is sinking. The water is rising. Be Noah. Build new ships. And don’t bother adding “an FDA” to your new ship. That part is surplus to requirements.
I’m pretty sure (though not 100%) that “science doesn’t know for sure” that “benevolent government” is literally mathematically impossible. So I want to work on that! <3
Public choice theory probably comes closest to showing this. Please look into that if you haven’t already. And I’m interested to know what approach you want to work on.
Personally, I think the entire concept of government should be rederived from first principles from scratch and rebooted, as a sort of “backup fallback government” for the entire planet, with AI and blockshit
I think unfortunately this is very unlikely in the foreseeable future (absent superintelligent AI). Humans and their relationships are just too messy to fully model with our current theoretical tools, whereas existing institutions have often evolved to take more of human nature into account (e.g., academia leveraging people’s status striving to produce knowledge for the world, militaries leveraging solidarity with fellow soldiers to overcome selfishness/cowardice).
As an investor I’m keenly aware that we’re not even close to deriving the governance of a publicly held corporation from first principles. Once somebody solves that problem, I’d become much more excited about doing the same thing for government.
Public Choice Theory is a big field with lots and lots of nooks and crannies and in my surveys so far I have not found a good clean proof that benevolent government is impossible.
If you know of a good clean argument that benevolent government is mathematically impossible, it would alleviate a giant hole in my current knowledge, and help me resolve quite a few planning loops that are currently open. I would appreciate knowing the truth here for really real.
Broadly speaking, I’m pretty sure most governments over the last 10,000 years have been basically net-Evil slave empires, but the question here is sorta like: maybe this because that’s mathematically necessarily how any “government shaped economic arrangement” necessarily is, or maybe this is because of some contingent fact that just happened to be true in general in the past…
...like most people over the last 10,000 years were illiterate savages and they didn’t know any better, and that might explain the relatively “homogenously evil” character of historical governments and the way that government variation seems to be restricted to a small range of being “slightly more evil to slightly less evil”.
Or perhaps the problem is that all of human history has been human history, and there has never been a AI dictator nor AI general nor AI pope nor AI mega celebrity nor AI CEO. Not once. Not ever. And so maybe if that changed then we could “buck the trend line of generalized evil” in the future? A single inhumanly saintlike immortal leader might be all that it takes!
My hope is: despite the empirical truth that governments are evil in general, perhaps this evil has been for contingent reasons (maybe many contingent reasons (like there might be 20 independent causes of a government being non-benevolent, and you have to fix every single one of them to get the benevolent result)).
So long as it is logically possible to get a win condition, I think grit is the right virtue to emphasize in the pursuit of a win condition.
It would just be nice to even have an upper bound on how much optimization pressure would be required to generate a fully benevolent government, and I currently don’t even have this :-(
I grant, from my current subjective position, that it could be that it requires infinite optimization pressure… that is to say: it could be that “a benevolent government” is like “a perpetual motion machine”?
Applying grit, as a meta-programming choice applied to my own character structures, I remain forcefully hopeful that “a win condition is possible at all” despite the apparent empirical truth of some broadly catharist summary of the evils of nearly all governments, and darwinian evolution, and so on.
The only exceptions I’m quite certain about are the “net goodness” of sub-Dunbar social groupings among animals.
For example, a lion pride keeps a male lion around as a policy, despite the occasional mass killing of babies when a new male takes over. The cost in murdered babies is probably “worth it on net” compared to alternative policies where males are systematically driven out of a pride when they commit crimes, or females don’t even congregate into social groups.
Each pride is like a little country, and evolution would probably eliminate prides from the lion behavioral repertoire if it wasn’t net useful, so this is a sort of an existence proof of a limited and tiny government that is “clearly imperfect, but probably net good”.
((
In that case, of course, the utility function evolution has built these “emergent lion governments” to optimize for is simply “procreation”. Maybe that must be the utility function? Maybe you can’t add art or happiness or the-self-actualization-of-novel-persons-in-a-vibrant-community to that utility function and still have it work?? If someone proved it for real and got an “only one possible utility function”-result, it would fulfill some quite bleak lower level sorts of Wattsian predictions. And I can’t currently rigorously rule out this concern. So… yeah. Hopefully there can be benevolent governments AND these governments will have some budgetary discretion around preserving “politically useless but humanistically nice things”?
))
But in general, from beginnings like this small argument in favor of “lion government being net positive”, I think that it might be possible to generate a sort of “inductive proof”.
If N, then N+1: “When adding some social complexity to a ‘net worth it government’ (longer time rollout before deciding?) (more members in larger groups?) (deeper plies of tactical reasoning at each juncture by each agent?) the WORTH-KEEPING-IT-property itself can be reliably preserved, arbitrarily, forever, using only scale-free organizing principles”.
So I would say that’s close to my current best argument for hope.
If we can start with something minimally net positive, and scale it up forever, getting better and better at including more and more concerns in fair ways, then… huzzah!
And that’s why grit seems like “not an insane thing to apply” to the pursuit of a win condition where a benevolent government could exist for all of Earth.
I just don’t have the details of that proof, nor the anthropological nor ethological nor historical data at hand :-(
The strong contrasting claim would be: maybe there is an upper bound. Maybe small packs of animals (or small groups of humans, or whatever) are the limit for some reason? Maybe there are strong constraints implying definite finitudes that limit the degree to which “things can be systematically Good”?
Maybe singleton’s can’t exist indefinitely. Maybe there will always be civil wars, always be predation, always be fraud, always be abortion, always be infanticide, always be murder, always be misleading advertising, always be cannibalism, always be agents coherently and successfully pursuing unfair allocations outside of safely limited finite games… Maybe there will always be evil, woven into the very structure of governments and social processes, as has been the case since the beginning of human history.
Maybe it is like that because it MUST be like that. Maybe its like that because of math. Maybe it is like that across the entire Tegmark IV multiverse: maybe “if persons in groups, then net evil prevails”?
I have two sketches for a proof that this might be true, because it is responsible and productive to slosh back and forth between “cognitive extremes (best and worst planning cases, true and false hypotheses, etc) that are justified by the data and the ongoing attempt to reconcile the data” still.
Procedure: Try to prove X, then try to prove not-X, and then maybe spend some time considering Goedel and Turing with respect to X. Eventually some X-related-conclusion will be produced! :-)
I think I’d prefer not to talk too much about the proof sketches for the universal inevitability of evil among men.
I might be wrong about them, but also it might convince some in the audience, and that seems like it could be an infohazard? Maybe? And this response is already too large <3
But if anyone already has a proof of the inevitability of evil government, then I’d really appreciate them letting me know that they have one (possibly in private) because I’m non-trivially likely to find the proof eventually anyway, if such proofs exist to be found, and I promise to pay you at least $1000 for the proof, if proof you have. (Offer only good to the first such person. My budget is also finite.)
I apologize. I think the topic is very large, and inferential distances would best be bridged either by the fortuitous coincidence of us having studied similar things (like two multidisciplinary researchers with similar interests accidentally meeting at a conference), or else I’d have to create a non-trivially structured class full of pre-tests and post-tests and micro-lessons, to get someone from “the hodge-podge of high school math and history and biology and econ and civics and cognitive science and theology and computer science that might be in any random literate person’s head… through various claims widely considered true in various fields, up to the active interdisciplinary research area where I know that I am confused as I try to figure out if X or not-X (or variations on X that are better formulated) is actually true”. Sprawl of words like this is close to the best I can do with my limited public writing budget :-(
I wrote 1843 words in response, but it was a bad essay.
This is a from-scratch second draft focused on linking the specifics of the FDA to the thing I actually care about, which is the platonic form of the Good, and its manifestation in the actual world.
The problem is that I’m basically an albigenisian, or cathar, or manichian, in that I believe that there is a logically coherent thing called Goodness and that it is mostly not physically realized in our world and our world’s history.
Most governments are very far from a “Good shape”, and one of the ways that they are far from this shape is that they actively resist being put into a Good shape.
The US in 1820 was very unusually good compared to most historically available comparison objects but that’s not saying very much since most governments, in general, are conspiracies of powerful evil men collaborating to fight with each other marginally less than they otherwise would fight in the absence of their traditional conflict minimization procedures, thus forming a localized cartel that runs a regional protection racket.
The FDA is thus a locally insoluble instance of a much much larger problem.
From December 2019 to February 2022 the nearly universal failure of most governments to adequately handle the covid crisis made the “generalized evil-or-incompetent state” of nearly all worldy governments salient to the common person.
In that period, by explaining in detail how the FDA (and NIH and OSHA and CDC and so on) contributed to the catastrophe, there was a teachable moment regarding the general tragedy facing the general world.
The general problem can be explained in several ways, but one way to explain it is that neither Putin nor Hamas are that different from most governments.
They are different in magnitude and direction… they are different from other governments in who specifically they officially treat as an outgroup, and how strong they are. (All inner parties are inner parties, however.)
Since Putin and Hamas clearly would hurt you and me if they could do so profitably, but since they also obviously can’t hurt you and me, it is reasonably safe for you and me to talk about “how Putin and Hamas would be overthrown and replaced with non-Bad governance for their respective communities, and how this would be Good”.
From a distance, we can see that Putin is preying on the mothers and families and children of Russia, and we can see that Hamas is preying on the mothers and families and children of Palestine.
Basically, my argument is that every government is currently preying upon every group of people they rule, rather than serving those people, on net.
I’m opposed to death, I’m opposed to taxes, and I’m opposed to the FDA because the FDA is a sort of “tax” (regulations are a behavioral tax) that produces “death” (the lack of medical innovation unto a cure for death).
These are all similar and linked to me. They are vast nearly insoluble tragedies that almost no one is even willing to look at clearly and say “I cannot personally solve this right now, but if I could solve it then it would be worth solving.”
Not that there aren’t solutions! Logically, we haven’t ruled out solutions in full generality in public discussions yet!
I’m pretty sure (though not 100%) that “science doesn’t know for sure” that “benevolent government” is literally mathematically impossible. So I want to work on that! <3
However… in Palestine they don’t talk much in public about how to fix the problem that “Hamas exists in the way that it does” and in Russia they don’t talk much in public about how to fix that “Putin exists in the way that he does” and in China they don’t talk much in public about how to fix that “the CCP exists in the way that it does”, and so on...
The US, luckily, still has a modicum of “free speech” and so I’m allowed to say “All of our presidents are and have been basically evil” and I’m allowed to say “FDA delenda est” and I’m allowed to say “The Constitution legally enshrines legalized slavery for some, and that is bad, and until it changes we in the US should admit that the US is pretty darn evil. Our median voter functionally endorses slavery, and so our median voter is functionally a moral monster, and if we have any moral leaders then they are the kind of moral leader who will serve evil voters IN SPITE of the obvious evils.”
I don’t usually bring up “that the FDA is evil” very much anymore.
Covid is old news. The common man is forgetting and the zeitgeist has moved on.
Lately I’ve been falling back to the much broader and simpler idea that the US Constitution should be amended to simply remove the part of the 13th amendment that literally legalizes literal slavery.
This seems like a cleaner thing, that could easily fit within the five word limit.
And perhaps, after decades of legalisitic struggle, the US could change this one bad law to finally make slavery fully illegal?
But there are millions of bad laws.
Personally, I think the entire concept of government should be rederived from first principles from scratch and rebooted, as a sort of “backup fallback government” for the entire planet, with AI and blockshit, until all the old governments still exist, like the way there are still torture machines in museums of torture, but we just don’t use any of the old governments anymore.
There’s a logically possible objection from the other direction, saying that government is necessarily evil and there just shouldn’t be one. I disagree with this because good institutions are incredibly important to good outcomes, empirically, and also the consent of the governed seems like valid formula. I’m an archist and not an anarchist.
But I’d aim for a state of affairs where instead of using the old governments, we would use things like a Justice API, and Local Barter Points, and a Council of DACs, and a Polyhive Senate Of Self Defense, and Open Source Parliamentarians (AIs built to represent humans within an Open Source Governance framework like in the backstory of Lady Of Mazes), and other weird new things?
Then at some point I’d expect that if most people on Earth looked at their local violence monopoly and had the thought “hey, I’m just not using this anymore” it would lead to waves, in various places, and due to various crises, of whole regions of Earth upgrading their subscriptions to the new system (maybe taking some oaths of mutual defense and signing up for a few new DACs) and then… we’d have something much much better without the drawbacks of the old stuff.
If such “fallback governance systems” had been designed and built in 2019, then I think covid would have caused such a natural phase transition for many countries, when previous systems had visibly and clearly lost the global mandate of heaven.
And if or when such phase transitions occur, there would still be a question of whether the old system will continue to try to prey on the people voluntarily switching over to a new and better system...
And I think it is clear to me and most of my readers that no such reform plan is within any Overton Window in sight...
...and maybe you therefore don’t think THIS could be a realistic way to make the FDA not exist in 2026 or 2028 or 2033 (or any other near term date)…
...but a cautious first principles reboot of the global order to address the numerous and obvious failures of the old order is currently the best I can currently come up with on BOTH the (1) realism and (2) goodness axes.
And while possible replacement system(s) for the government are still being designed, the only people I think it would be worth working with on this project are people who can independently notice that the FDA is evil, and independently notice that slavery is bad and also legal in the US (and also hopefully they can do math and have security mindset).
So, I still endorse “FDA delenda est” but I don’t think there’s a lot of point to beating that dead horse, or talking about the precise logistics of how to move deck chairs on the titanic around such that the FDA could be doing slightly less evil things while the ship sinks.
The ship is sinking. The water is rising. Be Noah. Build new ships. And don’t bother adding “an FDA” to your new ship. That part is surplus to requirements.
Public choice theory probably comes closest to showing this. Please look into that if you haven’t already. And I’m interested to know what approach you want to work on.
I think unfortunately this is very unlikely in the foreseeable future (absent superintelligent AI). Humans and their relationships are just too messy to fully model with our current theoretical tools, whereas existing institutions have often evolved to take more of human nature into account (e.g., academia leveraging people’s status striving to produce knowledge for the world, militaries leveraging solidarity with fellow soldiers to overcome selfishness/cowardice).
As an investor I’m keenly aware that we’re not even close to deriving the governance of a publicly held corporation from first principles. Once somebody solves that problem, I’d become much more excited about doing the same thing for government.
Public Choice Theory is a big field with lots and lots of nooks and crannies and in my surveys so far I have not found a good clean proof that benevolent government is impossible.
If you know of a good clean argument that benevolent government is mathematically impossible, it would alleviate a giant hole in my current knowledge, and help me resolve quite a few planning loops that are currently open. I would appreciate knowing the truth here for really real.
Broadly speaking, I’m pretty sure most governments over the last 10,000 years have been basically net-Evil slave empires, but the question here is sorta like: maybe this because that’s mathematically necessarily how any “government shaped economic arrangement” necessarily is, or maybe this is because of some contingent fact that just happened to be true in general in the past…
...like most people over the last 10,000 years were illiterate savages and they didn’t know any better, and that might explain the relatively “homogenously evil” character of historical governments and the way that government variation seems to be restricted to a small range of being “slightly more evil to slightly less evil”.
Or perhaps the problem is that all of human history has been human history, and there has never been a AI dictator nor AI general nor AI pope nor AI mega celebrity nor AI CEO. Not once. Not ever. And so maybe if that changed then we could “buck the trend line of generalized evil” in the future? A single inhumanly saintlike immortal leader might be all that it takes!
My hope is: despite the empirical truth that governments are evil in general, perhaps this evil has been for contingent reasons (maybe many contingent reasons (like there might be 20 independent causes of a government being non-benevolent, and you have to fix every single one of them to get the benevolent result)).
So long as it is logically possible to get a win condition, I think grit is the right virtue to emphasize in the pursuit of a win condition.
It would just be nice to even have an upper bound on how much optimization pressure would be required to generate a fully benevolent government, and I currently don’t even have this :-(
I grant, from my current subjective position, that it could be that it requires infinite optimization pressure… that is to say: it could be that “a benevolent government” is like “a perpetual motion machine”?
Applying grit, as a meta-programming choice applied to my own character structures, I remain forcefully hopeful that “a win condition is possible at all” despite the apparent empirical truth of some broadly catharist summary of the evils of nearly all governments, and darwinian evolution, and so on.
The only exceptions I’m quite certain about are the “net goodness” of sub-Dunbar social groupings among animals.
For example, a lion pride keeps a male lion around as a policy, despite the occasional mass killing of babies when a new male takes over. The cost in murdered babies is probably “worth it on net” compared to alternative policies where males are systematically driven out of a pride when they commit crimes, or females don’t even congregate into social groups.
Each pride is like a little country, and evolution would probably eliminate prides from the lion behavioral repertoire if it wasn’t net useful, so this is a sort of an existence proof of a limited and tiny government that is “clearly imperfect, but probably net good”.
((
In that case, of course, the utility function evolution has built these “emergent lion governments” to optimize for is simply “procreation”. Maybe that must be the utility function? Maybe you can’t add art or happiness or the-self-actualization-of-novel-persons-in-a-vibrant-community to that utility function and still have it work?? If someone proved it for real and got an “only one possible utility function”-result, it would fulfill some quite bleak lower level sorts of Wattsian predictions. And I can’t currently rigorously rule out this concern. So… yeah. Hopefully there can be benevolent governments AND these governments will have some budgetary discretion around preserving “politically useless but humanistically nice things”?
))
But in general, from beginnings like this small argument in favor of “lion government being net positive”, I think that it might be possible to generate a sort of “inductive proof”.
1. “Simple governments can be worth even non-trivial costs (like ~5% of babies murdered on average, in waves of murderous purges (or whatever the net-tolerable taxation process of the government looks like))” and also..
If N, then N+1: “When adding some social complexity to a ‘net worth it government’ (longer time rollout before deciding?) (more members in larger groups?) (deeper plies of tactical reasoning at each juncture by each agent?) the WORTH-KEEPING-IT-property itself can be reliably preserved, arbitrarily, forever, using only scale-free organizing principles”.
So I would say that’s close to my current best argument for hope.
If we can start with something minimally net positive, and scale it up forever, getting better and better at including more and more concerns in fair ways, then… huzzah!
And that’s why grit seems like “not an insane thing to apply” to the pursuit of a win condition where a benevolent government could exist for all of Earth.
I just don’t have the details of that proof, nor the anthropological nor ethological nor historical data at hand :-(
The strong contrasting claim would be: maybe there is an upper bound. Maybe small packs of animals (or small groups of humans, or whatever) are the limit for some reason? Maybe there are strong constraints implying definite finitudes that limit the degree to which “things can be systematically Good”?
Maybe singleton’s can’t exist indefinitely. Maybe there will always be civil wars, always be predation, always be fraud, always be abortion, always be infanticide, always be murder, always be misleading advertising, always be cannibalism, always be agents coherently and successfully pursuing unfair allocations outside of safely limited finite games… Maybe there will always be evil, woven into the very structure of governments and social processes, as has been the case since the beginning of human history.
Maybe it is like that because it MUST be like that. Maybe its like that because of math. Maybe it is like that across the entire Tegmark IV multiverse: maybe “if persons in groups, then net evil prevails”?
I have two sketches for a proof that this might be true, because it is responsible and productive to slosh back and forth between “cognitive extremes (best and worst planning cases, true and false hypotheses, etc) that are justified by the data and the ongoing attempt to reconcile the data” still.
Procedure: Try to prove X, then try to prove not-X, and then maybe spend some time considering Goedel and Turing with respect to X. Eventually some X-related-conclusion will be produced! :-)
I think I’d prefer not to talk too much about the proof sketches for the universal inevitability of evil among men.
I might be wrong about them, but also it might convince some in the audience, and that seems like it could be an infohazard? Maybe? And this response is already too large <3
But if anyone already has a proof of the inevitability of evil government, then I’d really appreciate them letting me know that they have one (possibly in private) because I’m non-trivially likely to find the proof eventually anyway, if such proofs exist to be found, and I promise to pay you at least $1000 for the proof, if proof you have. (Offer only good to the first such person. My budget is also finite.)
Can you reformulate your thoughts to be more readable? It’s quite hard to make heads or tails out of the points listed.
I apologize. I think the topic is very large, and inferential distances would best be bridged either by the fortuitous coincidence of us having studied similar things (like two multidisciplinary researchers with similar interests accidentally meeting at a conference), or else I’d have to create a non-trivially structured class full of pre-tests and post-tests and micro-lessons, to get someone from “the hodge-podge of high school math and history and biology and econ and civics and cognitive science and theology and computer science that might be in any random literate person’s head… through various claims widely considered true in various fields, up to the active interdisciplinary research area where I know that I am confused as I try to figure out if X or not-X (or variations on X that are better formulated) is actually true”. Sprawl of words like this is close to the best I can do with my limited public writing budget :-(
So are you planning to convince anyone?
Because so far this jumble of thoughts seems unlikely to be genuinely convincing, let alone to move folks in Washington to do something.