The policy of “if two people object then the plan doesn’t go through” sets up a unilateralist-curse scenario for the people against the plan—after the first person says no, every future person is now able to unilaterally stop the plan, regardless of how many people are in favor of it. (See also Scott’s comment.) Ideally we’d avoid that; majority vote of comments does so (and seems like the principled solution).
(Though at this point it’s probably moot given the existing number of nays.)
Let’s, for the hell of it, assume real money got involved. Like, it was $50M or something.
Now — who would you want to be able to vote on whether destruction happens if their values aren’t met with that amount of money at stake?
If it’s the whole internet, most people will treat it as entertainment or competition as opposed to considering what we actually care about.
But if we’re going to limit it only to people that are thoughtful, that invalidates the point of majority vote doesn’t it?
Think about it, I’m not going to write out all the implications, but I think your faith in crowdsourced voting mechanisms for things with known-short-payoff against with long-unknown-costs that destroy long-unknown-gains is perhaps misplaced...?
Most people are — factually speaking — not educated on all relevant topics, not fully numerate on statistics and payoff calculations, go with their feelings instead of analysis, and are short-term thinkers.......…
If we could figure out some reasonable way to poll people I agree, but I don’t see a good way to do that, especially not on this timescale?
Presumably you could take the majority vote of comments left in a 2 hour span?
^ Yeah, that.
The policy of “if two people object then the plan doesn’t go through” sets up a unilateralist-curse scenario for the people against the plan—after the first person says no, every future person is now able to unilaterally stop the plan, regardless of how many people are in favor of it. (See also Scott’s comment.) Ideally we’d avoid that; majority vote of comments does so (and seems like the principled solution).
(Though at this point it’s probably moot given the existing number of nays.)
Let’s, for the hell of it, assume real money got involved. Like, it was $50M or something.
Now — who would you want to be able to vote on whether destruction happens if their values aren’t met with that amount of money at stake?
If it’s the whole internet, most people will treat it as entertainment or competition as opposed to considering what we actually care about.
But if we’re going to limit it only to people that are thoughtful, that invalidates the point of majority vote doesn’t it?
Think about it, I’m not going to write out all the implications, but I think your faith in crowdsourced voting mechanisms for things with known-short-payoff against with long-unknown-costs that destroy long-unknown-gains is perhaps misplaced...?
Most people are — factually speaking — not educated on all relevant topics, not fully numerate on statistics and payoff calculations, go with their feelings instead of analysis, and are short-term thinkers.......…
I agree that in general this is a problem, but I think in this particular case we have the obvious choice of the set of all people with launch codes.
(Btw, your counterargument also applies to the unilateralist curse itself.)