How? by rational discourse, I guess.
By whom? I guess some sort of representative body.
What happens in this society, if I want a bigger house than the state thinks I need?
I don’t know but I imagine that some kind of balanced utility function could be produced that could provide different resource allocation. e.g. bigger shelter (if requested).
MIRI exists because Peter Thiel is a billionaire and has free money to spend on courses he finds worthwhile. No representative body funds the kind of work MIRI is doing.
The private money that goes into space exploration and mining asteroids seems to be much smarter than NASA money.
Plurality is an important concept. Decentralizing resources is useful.
I agree with you. This is the world as we know it.
We are, however, exploring here. What would be the point of an exploration if we remain stuck in the old paradigms. Just because most of this world is a masked oligarchy where people with money control public policy does not mean that a more just and rational political representation can ever exist.
As far as exploring goes, good exploring is about describing how alternatives could work.
I agree with you. [...] What would be the point of an exploration if we remain stuck in the old paradigms.
No, I don’t think you understand me. I’m not the person to advocate staying in old paradigms. It’s just that being a heretic is hard work.
The argument that you are making isn’t a new paradigm it’s not much different from what Marx said 150 years ago. It’s old. A new argument about that we have measurement about rich people having less empathy but otherwise it’s all old and boring.
I agree. I’m only at the beginning. One of the reasons I started to lurk around here is a need for clarity in my own thinking. I often am vague and expose half baked ideas. I hope that this will change in time.
I agree. I’m only at the beginning. One of the reasons I started to lurk around here is a need for clarity in my own thinking.
You need more than clarity in your own thinking. You also need to understand the positions of others.
I know how a German political party works from the inside. I have to extrapolate from that if I’m talking about US politics but I don’t just say that something is bad because I don’t understand what it’s good for.
I do expect rather more justification of a proposal that the state shall direct all resources beyond the basic needs (as defined by that state) of individuals than merely “somehow”. Especially given the record of the totalitarian states of the last century.
Well… I did mentioned the fact that increase in wealth correlates with decrease compassion. There is also the flat-lining of experiential happiness above a certain income as described by Kahneman.
But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you are expecting. Could you give more information about what kind of information would you like to receive?
Also, I lived my entire childhood in such a totalitarian state. I am aware of how bad state involvement in these matters can be.
Also, I lived my entire childhood in such a totalitarian state. I am aware of how bad state involvement in these matters can be.
Which makes it all the stranger that you propose, without seeming to have given it any thought, a totalitarian state that will somehow just work. Can you imagine no other way the world could work than as a totalitarian state somewhere on a spectrum of bad to good?
I haven’t proposed a totalitarian state. This is something that you inferred from what I’ve wrote.
I was talking about a society with certain characteristics.
I was thinking more about a StarTrek kind of thing than an old soviet republic.
One practical, slow way in which I see this happening is by shifting the focus on cooperation in education and slowly limiting the massive accumulation of wealth together with strong regulations regarding ecological impact and labour compensation.
Another interesting approach was an initiative called 1:12 proposed in Switzerland. Unfortunately, that initiative got hit massively with FUD from the competition which was able to outspend it in terms of advertising 40:1.
I haven’t proposed a totalitarian state. This is something that you inferred from what I’ve wrote.
Marx didn’t propose a totalitarian state either. His ideas still lead to a totalitarian state. Ideas have consequences. If you don’t know how the alternative will work to the status quo you want to destroy, than it makes sense to assume a bad outcome.
Marx’s ideas were perverted by Lenin and the totalitarian mess we saw last century derived from that.
Also, I’m not advocating the destruction of the status quo but its transformation, its transcendence. I’m non-violent and I don’t believe in forced societies. My hope is that we will outgrow the old ways.
Marx’s ideas were perverted by Lenin and the totalitarian mess we saw last century derived from that.
That doesn’t change that Marx carries some responsibility for what happened.
Terry Pratchett wrote somewhere that one person writes an innocent book about political philosophy and then the people who read the book don’t get the jokes and other people have to pay for it in blood.
People payed in blood for the revolution in Egypt and now the freedom of speech in Egypt is less than it was before the revolution.
Basically technology provides too much power to do things. If people don’t act responsibility with the increased amount of power that humans accidents will happen.
It might be an UFAI that destroys human civilization or it might be another thread which we understand even less. The important point is that the cost of mistakes and not acting fully responsible rise.
You are talking about a state that takes everything from everyone beyond what they “need”. When I asked how my desire for a bigger house than I “need” would be met, this was the exchange:
What happens in this society, if I want a bigger house than the state thinks I need?
I don’t know but I imagine that some kind of balanced utility function could be produced that could provide different resource allocation. e.g. bigger shelter (if requested).
“Totalitarian” is exactly the right word for this. This is a vision of the state giving and the state taking away, where all belongs to the state and personal property is to be justified by a plea of need.
One very fine idea I found was in a Howard Gardner interview for BigThink (scroll down to ” What is the US getting wrong?” )
I don’t agree with caps on individual wealth, and were I Swiss, I’d have voted against 1:12 even without seeing any of the so-called FUD. (You don’t think it possible that any of the opposition was from people who simply judged it to be a bad idea for the society?) But something Gardner says later on I find worth quoting:
I think one of the good features about the United States—since I’ve been bashing it—is that it’s built into our DNA to take a chance, and if we fail, to try again. … I said [to East Asians asking for a recipe for creativity] you’ve got to try something out, try to get some other people to support you, and if it doesn’t work, what can you learn from it?
Compare this succinct statement of why capitalism works so well, from a recent comment here:
The only reason capitalism works is that the losing experiments run out of money.
That brake on failure is really important. When someone decides to Do Something and commits their resources to it, if it doesn’t work out, they have to stop. A government’s ability to carry on regardless is in comparison almost unlimited. The government of the day have their jobs at risk, but nothing more.
“Totalitarian” is exactly the right word for this. This is a vision of the state giving and the state taking away, where all belongs to the state and personal property is to be justified by a plea of need.
There might be some terminological confusion here. To expand on what you’ve written, totalitarianism doesn’t necessarily describe repressive or ultra-nationalist governments, though historically totalitarian governments have often been highly nationalist and have almost always been repressive. Instead, it describes governments which claim total identity of state with society; or, to put it another way, where citizens’ behavior is accepted as legitimate by the government to the extent that it’s directed toward state goals and ideology.
I can think of some (more or less stable or scalable) societies which don’t include notions of private property as generally accepted in the modern First World, but which are not totalitarian. But if some state-defined utility function is governing resource allocations, that’s pretty hard to square with any other alternative.
I can think of some (more or less stable or scalable) societies which don’t include notions of private property as generally accepted in the modern First World, but which are not totalitarian.
What do you have in mind besides kibbutzim?
A highly relevant issue here is the freedom to exit. Many small communities (e.g. religious cults) can be quite totalitarian but as long as there is freedom to exit we don’t consider them horribly repressive. On the other hand I can’t imagine how a totalitarian society without the freedom to exit can be anything but repressive.
Most of the best examples are historical, although kibbutzim and certain other religious or social communities do seem to qualify. Feudal systems of property rights for example often held all property to ultimately belong to the monarch, but didn’t allow for enough centralized control to qualify as totalitarian.
You are talking about a state that takes everything from everyone beyond what they “need”.
I never said anything about the state taking.
“Totalitarian” is exactly the right word for this. This is a vision of the state giving and the state taking away, where all belongs to the state and personal property is to be justified by a plea of need.
Again… you are projecting your vision of what I said but you did brought up an interesting idea… the idea of personal property. I don’t think land should be owned by people. If people don’t own the land, then it follows that houses should not be owned by people.
Do you see any way in which this could be implemented without totalitarianism?
I don’t agree with caps on individual wealth, and were I Swiss, I’d have voted against 1:12 even without seeing any of the so-called FUD.
Why not?
The only reason capitalism works is that the losing experiments run out of money.
That brake on failure is really important. When someone decides to Do Something and commits their resources to it, if it doesn’t work out, they have to stop. A government’s ability to carry on regardless is in comparison almost unlimited.
Is the defence budget of USA for the past 60 years an experiment that ran out of money?
We were talking about a new society, one that runs on rationality. Experiments in this kind of society could have very clear parameters for a brake.
I look at capitalist societies and what I see is oligarchies masquerading as capitalism. The game is rigged and people are too afraid to even dream of changing it because, in most cases… this is the only game they know OR… the other games are just as bad.
Is really capitalism the best way to handle education? Healthcare? Public transportation infrastructure? Defence?
To me, the stories with happy people “finishing paying their college loans” are horror stories. Stories with people getting charged thousands of dollars for simple medical procedures are insane. People maximising PROFITS out of selling weapons and military technology/services… is not the mark of a sane and healthy society.
If people don’t own the land, then it follows that houses should not be owned by people.
This seems to make some questionable assumptions about the relationship of immovable property to land. I’ve heard of traditional systems of tenure where people don’t own land per se, but have claim to it insofar as they modify it or build structures upon it: you couldn’t own a square mile of wilderness, for example, but you could own a house or a cultivated field.
This tends to work better in a society that runs on small-scale agriculture, where a single mode of cultivation is about all land ever gets used for, and where the amount of land you can cultivate is limited by the livestock and tools you own and the number of workers you have access to (either hired or part of your family). It’d be difficult to extend to modern land use. But it is an internally consistent way of thinking about tenure.
This seems to make some questionable assumptions about the relationship of immovable property to land.
Actually, the issue is with the word “own”, or, rather, with the concept of property.
Property isn’t a binary yes/no thing. The usual way of describing property is as a “bundle of rights”. In different times and places that bundle may and does contain different numbers of different rights.
For example, a basic property right is the right to exclude. You can (usually) prevent other people from using your property without your consent. Another property right is the right to destroy. Etc. etc.
That’s another issue, yes—and models of land ownership and tenure have historically been pretty varied in terms of the rights they confer. (For a simple example, consider the concept of right of way.) But you don’t need to start breaking property rights down here to get the cracks to show.
By whom should it be owned, then? Or to unpack the concept of ownership, who gets to farm, or mine, or build on a given piece of land, and how will it be decided? Is the answer going to again be “somehow”? You say I’m reading my vision into your words, but that’s because I’m not seeing any vision in them.
We were talking about a new society, one that runs on rationality.
I am not seeing the rationality content here.
I’m leaving the rest unresponded to, because we’re both of us well into politics-as-mindkiller territory here, and I don’t think prolonging the discussion is going to be useful in this venue.
ETA: But it would be polite for me to respond to your direct question, why I don’t agree with caps on individual wealth. Because every honestly earned dollar in someone’s hands means that they created more than a dollar’s worth of value in someone else’s. That is what it is, to earn money. When people pay you for what you do, your financial worth is a measure of the value you have created for them. Why cap that?
Of course, there are dishonest people, but to take away everyone’s supposed excess money as a remedy is to fine everyone for the deeds of a few. And there are the practical issues of people evading such regulations by emigrating or restructuring their affairs so as not to legally “own” the wealth that they actually have control over. The dishonest are at an advantage here.
I have heard (unsourced anecdote) that when you ask people what is the largest income anyone really needs, they generally name a figure about 10 times their own. Whatever their own income is.
I also discovered that my comments are down voted into oblivion. … I have to assume that my contributions to this forum are not yet of high enough quality.
This forum is better than most but has not achieved enlightenment (yet :-D). Some up- or down-voting happens on the basis of the quality of comments, but a lot just signals the agreement or disagreement with the views of the poster.
You basically proposed communism which magically lacked all the icky bits. That will get you a bunch of downvotes :-)
Some up- or down-voting happens on the basis of the quality of comments, but a lot just signals the agreement or disagreement with the views of the poster.
Oh well… I’m totally ok on being downvoted on accounts of low quality of my comments however, I wasn’t really expecting people here to downvote comments just because they don’t agree with them. I have adjusted that belief now and will act with a little bit more caution.
You basically proposed communism which magically lacked all the icky bits. That will get you a bunch of downvotes :-)
I guess I did that :) but it was a good lesson. It pointed to the fact that I should refrain from speaking without having at least a reasonable model about what I am speaking about. :)
To me, the stories with happy people “finishing paying their college loans” are horror stories. Stories with people getting charged thousands of dollars for simple medical procedures are insane. People maximising PROFITS out of selling weapons and military technology/services… is not the mark of a sane and healthy society.
Of note: most universities are either run by the government, or by non-profit organizations. Ditto for most hospitals.
How? by rational discourse, I guess. By whom? I guess some sort of representative body.
I don’t know but I imagine that some kind of balanced utility function could be produced that could provide different resource allocation. e.g. bigger shelter (if requested).
MIRI exists because Peter Thiel is a billionaire and has free money to spend on courses he finds worthwhile. No representative body funds the kind of work MIRI is doing.
The private money that goes into space exploration and mining asteroids seems to be much smarter than NASA money.
Plurality is an important concept. Decentralizing resources is useful.
I agree with you. This is the world as we know it.
We are, however, exploring here. What would be the point of an exploration if we remain stuck in the old paradigms. Just because most of this world is a masked oligarchy where people with money control public policy does not mean that a more just and rational political representation can ever exist.
As far as exploring goes, good exploring is about describing how alternatives could work.
No, I don’t think you understand me. I’m not the person to advocate staying in old paradigms. It’s just that being a heretic is hard work.
The argument that you are making isn’t a new paradigm it’s not much different from what Marx said 150 years ago. It’s old. A new argument about that we have measurement about rich people having less empathy but otherwise it’s all old and boring.
As far as what I wrote lately about my political philosophy the posts I wrote in http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jmt/some_tools_for_optimizing_our_media_use/ might be interesting for you.
I agree. I’m only at the beginning. One of the reasons I started to lurk around here is a need for clarity in my own thinking. I often am vague and expose half baked ideas. I hope that this will change in time.
You need more than clarity in your own thinking. You also need to understand the positions of others.
I know how a German political party works from the inside. I have to extrapolate from that if I’m talking about US politics but I don’t just say that something is bad because I don’t understand what it’s good for.
In fewer words: you have no idea.
In fewer words, I don’t have a blueprint, nor a crystal ball. ;)
If you require either in order to have a conversation about the future… oh well… sorry to disappoint. ;)
I do expect rather more justification of a proposal that the state shall direct all resources beyond the basic needs (as defined by that state) of individuals than merely “somehow”. Especially given the record of the totalitarian states of the last century.
Well… I did mentioned the fact that increase in wealth correlates with decrease compassion. There is also the flat-lining of experiential happiness above a certain income as described by Kahneman.
But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you are expecting. Could you give more information about what kind of information would you like to receive?
Also, I lived my entire childhood in such a totalitarian state. I am aware of how bad state involvement in these matters can be.
Which makes it all the stranger that you propose, without seeming to have given it any thought, a totalitarian state that will somehow just work. Can you imagine no other way the world could work than as a totalitarian state somewhere on a spectrum of bad to good?
Which one, by the way?
I haven’t proposed a totalitarian state. This is something that you inferred from what I’ve wrote.
I was talking about a society with certain characteristics.
I was thinking more about a StarTrek kind of thing than an old soviet republic.
One practical, slow way in which I see this happening is by shifting the focus on cooperation in education and slowly limiting the massive accumulation of wealth together with strong regulations regarding ecological impact and labour compensation.
One very fine idea I found was in a Howard Gardner interview for BigThink (scroll down to ” What is the US getting wrong?” )
Another interesting approach was an initiative called 1:12 proposed in Switzerland. Unfortunately, that initiative got hit massively with FUD from the competition which was able to outspend it in terms of advertising 40:1.
Marx didn’t propose a totalitarian state either. His ideas still lead to a totalitarian state. Ideas have consequences. If you don’t know how the alternative will work to the status quo you want to destroy, than it makes sense to assume a bad outcome.
Marx’s ideas were perverted by Lenin and the totalitarian mess we saw last century derived from that.
Also, I’m not advocating the destruction of the status quo but its transformation, its transcendence. I’m non-violent and I don’t believe in forced societies. My hope is that we will outgrow the old ways.
That doesn’t change that Marx carries some responsibility for what happened.
Terry Pratchett wrote somewhere that one person writes an innocent book about political philosophy and then the people who read the book don’t get the jokes and other people have to pay for it in blood.
People payed in blood for the revolution in Egypt and now the freedom of speech in Egypt is less than it was before the revolution.
This is like accusing a blacksmith for a murder someone did with a knife he created.
Responsibility lies with the ones who act in a destructive way or the ones who coerce others to act destructively.
Marx wasn’t at all reticent about the necessity of dictatorship and terror.
If that’s the reigning philosophy I don’t think humanity survives the next 200 years.
What do you think would happen?
Basically technology provides too much power to do things. If people don’t act responsibility with the increased amount of power that humans accidents will happen.
It might be an UFAI that destroys human civilization or it might be another thread which we understand even less. The important point is that the cost of mistakes and not acting fully responsible rise.
You are talking about a state that takes everything from everyone beyond what they “need”. When I asked how my desire for a bigger house than I “need” would be met, this was the exchange:
“Totalitarian” is exactly the right word for this. This is a vision of the state giving and the state taking away, where all belongs to the state and personal property is to be justified by a plea of need.
I don’t agree with caps on individual wealth, and were I Swiss, I’d have voted against 1:12 even without seeing any of the so-called FUD. (You don’t think it possible that any of the opposition was from people who simply judged it to be a bad idea for the society?) But something Gardner says later on I find worth quoting:
Compare this succinct statement of why capitalism works so well, from a recent comment here:
That brake on failure is really important. When someone decides to Do Something and commits their resources to it, if it doesn’t work out, they have to stop. A government’s ability to carry on regardless is in comparison almost unlimited. The government of the day have their jobs at risk, but nothing more.
There might be some terminological confusion here. To expand on what you’ve written, totalitarianism doesn’t necessarily describe repressive or ultra-nationalist governments, though historically totalitarian governments have often been highly nationalist and have almost always been repressive. Instead, it describes governments which claim total identity of state with society; or, to put it another way, where citizens’ behavior is accepted as legitimate by the government to the extent that it’s directed toward state goals and ideology.
I can think of some (more or less stable or scalable) societies which don’t include notions of private property as generally accepted in the modern First World, but which are not totalitarian. But if some state-defined utility function is governing resource allocations, that’s pretty hard to square with any other alternative.
What do you have in mind besides kibbutzim?
A highly relevant issue here is the freedom to exit. Many small communities (e.g. religious cults) can be quite totalitarian but as long as there is freedom to exit we don’t consider them horribly repressive. On the other hand I can’t imagine how a totalitarian society without the freedom to exit can be anything but repressive.
Most of the best examples are historical, although kibbutzim and certain other religious or social communities do seem to qualify. Feudal systems of property rights for example often held all property to ultimately belong to the monarch, but didn’t allow for enough centralized control to qualify as totalitarian.
I never said anything about the state taking.
Again… you are projecting your vision of what I said but you did brought up an interesting idea… the idea of personal property. I don’t think land should be owned by people. If people don’t own the land, then it follows that houses should not be owned by people.
Do you see any way in which this could be implemented without totalitarianism?
Why not?
Is the defence budget of USA for the past 60 years an experiment that ran out of money?
We were talking about a new society, one that runs on rationality. Experiments in this kind of society could have very clear parameters for a brake.
I look at capitalist societies and what I see is oligarchies masquerading as capitalism. The game is rigged and people are too afraid to even dream of changing it because, in most cases… this is the only game they know OR… the other games are just as bad.
Is really capitalism the best way to handle education? Healthcare? Public transportation infrastructure? Defence?
To me, the stories with happy people “finishing paying their college loans” are horror stories. Stories with people getting charged thousands of dollars for simple medical procedures are insane. People maximising PROFITS out of selling weapons and military technology/services… is not the mark of a sane and healthy society.
And who will this society consist of? Humans are not rational and do not show signs of becoming considerably more rational in the near future.
This seems to make some questionable assumptions about the relationship of immovable property to land. I’ve heard of traditional systems of tenure where people don’t own land per se, but have claim to it insofar as they modify it or build structures upon it: you couldn’t own a square mile of wilderness, for example, but you could own a house or a cultivated field.
This tends to work better in a society that runs on small-scale agriculture, where a single mode of cultivation is about all land ever gets used for, and where the amount of land you can cultivate is limited by the livestock and tools you own and the number of workers you have access to (either hired or part of your family). It’d be difficult to extend to modern land use. But it is an internally consistent way of thinking about tenure.
Actually, the issue is with the word “own”, or, rather, with the concept of property.
Property isn’t a binary yes/no thing. The usual way of describing property is as a “bundle of rights”. In different times and places that bundle may and does contain different numbers of different rights.
For example, a basic property right is the right to exclude. You can (usually) prevent other people from using your property without your consent. Another property right is the right to destroy. Etc. etc.
That’s another issue, yes—and models of land ownership and tenure have historically been pretty varied in terms of the rights they confer. (For a simple example, consider the concept of right of way.) But you don’t need to start breaking property rights down here to get the cracks to show.
By whom should it be owned, then? Or to unpack the concept of ownership, who gets to farm, or mine, or build on a given piece of land, and how will it be decided? Is the answer going to again be “somehow”? You say I’m reading my vision into your words, but that’s because I’m not seeing any vision in them.
I am not seeing the rationality content here.
I’m leaving the rest unresponded to, because we’re both of us well into politics-as-mindkiller territory here, and I don’t think prolonging the discussion is going to be useful in this venue.
ETA: But it would be polite for me to respond to your direct question, why I don’t agree with caps on individual wealth. Because every honestly earned dollar in someone’s hands means that they created more than a dollar’s worth of value in someone else’s. That is what it is, to earn money. When people pay you for what you do, your financial worth is a measure of the value you have created for them. Why cap that?
Of course, there are dishonest people, but to take away everyone’s supposed excess money as a remedy is to fine everyone for the deeds of a few. And there are the practical issues of people evading such regulations by emigrating or restructuring their affairs so as not to legally “own” the wealth that they actually have control over. The dishonest are at an advantage here.
I have heard (unsourced anecdote) that when you ask people what is the largest income anyone really needs, they generally name a figure about 10 times their own. Whatever their own income is.
I agree. I also discovered that my comments are down voted into oblivion.
I have to assume that my contributions to this forum are not yet of high enough quality.
Anyways… I’m grateful for your comments. They have been uncomfortable and made me think.
This forum is better than most but has not achieved enlightenment (yet :-D). Some up- or down-voting happens on the basis of the quality of comments, but a lot just signals the agreement or disagreement with the views of the poster.
You basically proposed communism which magically lacked all the icky bits. That will get you a bunch of downvotes :-)
Oh well… I’m totally ok on being downvoted on accounts of low quality of my comments however, I wasn’t really expecting people here to downvote comments just because they don’t agree with them. I have adjusted that belief now and will act with a little bit more caution.
I guess I did that :) but it was a good lesson. It pointed to the fact that I should refrain from speaking without having at least a reasonable model about what I am speaking about. :)
Of note: most universities are either run by the government, or by non-profit organizations. Ditto for most hospitals.