My reaction to the Churchill quote is: why don’t we try more forms of government?
Of course we can’t start with animal trials, but we can try with the American Antarctic base or a village then move up to city trials, state trials, and so on.
There are many organizations that need governance that most of the time still are not interested in experimenting with governance.
If you for example take student self-representation at universities, the structures are very similar in every US university because nobody really cares about experimenting with them. People have other priorities then experimenting with new governance systems.
That’s true. But just because people aren’t motivated, doesn’t mean we should try. It’s possible to create incentives with subsidies, direct payments, etc.
It’s unfortunate that monetary incentives are notoriously vulnerable to being Goodharted into uselessness or worse. You try to offer a bounty on X [undesirable thing], people start [building/breeding] more of them and making a killing. This is not to say incentives and/or subsidies can never work, only that implementing them effectively is a non-trivial task.
Yeah, it does seem tricky. OpenAI recently tried a unique governance structure and that it is tuning out unpredictable and might be costly in terms of legal fees and malfunction.,
While in theory, you can easily motivate people in politics with money, it tends to corrupt the process.
If you look at what happens in student self-governance, people usually aren’t doing it because they are motivated by money but by ideas.
You have people who are motivated by ideas of inclusion and equity. It’s not because those people direct subsides or direct payments but because their belief in the ideas and they get esteem from their peers for persuing those ends.
To make real progress at governance you would need people who primarily care about governance.
The idea about the American Antarctic base or a governing a village both require a decent amount of political capital to start.
You would need someone who’s both interpersonal skilled, intellectually curious and cares about governance as his most important political end. From there you can start with getting involved in various different government efforts. Then blog about it and provide advice for other people who need to create governance for the institutions they create.
In that way it’s similar to charter cities. An cheaper intermediate stage could be online organizations like World Of WarCraft gaming clans, or internet forums, or project overviews. They are not quite the same, but they are cheap.
My reaction to the Churchill quote is: why don’t we try more forms of government?
Of course we can’t start with animal trials, but we can try with the American Antarctic base or a village then move up to city trials, state trials, and so on.
There are many organizations that need governance that most of the time still are not interested in experimenting with governance.
If you for example take student self-representation at universities, the structures are very similar in every US university because nobody really cares about experimenting with them. People have other priorities then experimenting with new governance systems.
That’s true. But just because people aren’t motivated, doesn’t mean we should try. It’s possible to create incentives with subsidies, direct payments, etc.
It’s unfortunate that monetary incentives are notoriously vulnerable to being Goodharted into uselessness or worse. You try to offer a bounty on X [undesirable thing], people start [building/breeding] more of them and making a killing.
This is not to say incentives and/or subsidies can never work, only that implementing them effectively is a non-trivial task.
Yeah, it does seem tricky. OpenAI recently tried a unique governance structure and that it is tuning out unpredictable and might be costly in terms of legal fees and malfunction.,
While in theory, you can easily motivate people in politics with money, it tends to corrupt the process.
If you look at what happens in student self-governance, people usually aren’t doing it because they are motivated by money but by ideas.
You have people who are motivated by ideas of inclusion and equity. It’s not because those people direct subsides or direct payments but because their belief in the ideas and they get esteem from their peers for persuing those ends.
To make real progress at governance you would need people who primarily care about governance.
The idea about the American Antarctic base or a governing a village both require a decent amount of political capital to start.
You would need someone who’s both interpersonal skilled, intellectually curious and cares about governance as his most important political end. From there you can start with getting involved in various different government efforts. Then blog about it and provide advice for other people who need to create governance for the institutions they create.
In that way it’s similar to charter cities. An cheaper intermediate stage could be online organizations like World Of WarCraft gaming clans, or internet forums, or project overviews. They are not quite the same, but they are cheap.