I like this answer, if only for emotional reasons :). I also think the vast majority of seventy-years-old would be compelled by this argument.
Raw_Power
Karma: 1,050
Your post confuses me a lot: I am being entirely honest about this, there seem to be illusions of transparency and (un)common priors. The only part I feel capable of responding to is the first: I can perfectly imagine every human being having as much medical care as the chief of the wealthiest most powerful organization in the world, in an FAI-regimented society. For a given value of “imagining”, of course: I have a vague idea of nanomachines in the bloodstream, implants, etc. I basically expect human bodies to be self-sufficient in taking care of themsleves, and able to acquire and use the necessary raw materials with ease, including being able to medically operate on themselves. The rare cases will be left to the rare specialist, and I expect everyone to be able to take care of the more common problems their bodies and minds may encounter.
As for the rest of your post:
What are people’s rationing optimixation functions? Is it possible to get an entire society to agree to a single one, for a given value of “agree”? Or is it that people don’t have a consistent optimization function, and that it’s not so much a matter of some things being valued over others as a matter of tradition and sheer thoughtless inertia? Yes, I know I am answering questions with questions, but that’s all I got right now.
This theory seems to debunk the classical “people need an economic incentive to do their jobs”: it seems to imply that imposing and economic reward on the tax detracts from the intrinsinc enjoyment of the task by making the task performers think the task is for the sake of the remuneration rather than for its own sake. It also seems to suggest that, were this reward system be removed (but what would it be replaced with, practically speaking?) people might be happier by enjoying their own work.
^Hm. That’d be some very near-sighted companies and people, don’t you think? The Defending Your Doorstep fallacy etc. etc. Still, with some education fo the public (“Dear viewers, THIS is what would happen if everyone decided all the money should go to the Army right after a terrorist attack”) and some patches (I can’t imagine why people would put all their money into whatever they think is most important, rather than distributing it in an order of priorities: usually people’s interests aren’t so clear cut that they put one cause at such priority that the others become negligible… but if they did do that, just add a rule that there’s only so much of your money you can dedicate to a specific type of endeavor and all endeavors related),.
This reminds me of Kino’s Journey and the very neat simplisty solutions people used to their problems. The main reason those solutions failed was because the involved people were incrediby dumb at using them. The Democracy episode almost broke my willing suspension of disbelief, as did the Telepathy one. Are you familair with that story?
Well, at least the bureaucratic inefficiencies are entirely incidental to the problem, and there’s no decisive evidence for corporate bureaucracies to be any better than public ones (I suspect partisanship gets in the way of finding out said evidence, as well as a slew of other variables), so that factor… doesn’t factor. As for the higher taxes… how much are you ready to pay so that, the day you catch some horrible disease, the public entity will be able to afford diverting enough of its resources to save you? What are you more afraid of, cancer and other potentially-fatal diseases that will eventually kill you, terrorism/invading armies/criminals/people trying to kill you, boredom...? What would be your priorities in assigning which proportion of the taxes you pay goes to funding what projects?
… Actually that might be a neat reform. Budget decision by a combination of individual budget assignments by every citizen…
I have left it ambiguous on purpose. What this means specifically depends on the means available at any given time.
IDEALLY: Universal means everyone should have a right to as much health service as is necessary for their bodies and minds functioning as well as it can, if they ask for it. That would include education, coaching, and sports, among many others. And nobody should ever be allowed to die if they don’t want to and there’s any way of preventing it.
Between “leaving anyone to die because they don’t have the money or assets to pay for their treatment”[your question puzzles me, what part of this scenario don’t you understand] and “spending all our country’s budget on progressively changing the organs of seventy-year-.olds”, there’s a lot of intermediate points. The touchy problem is deciding how much we want to pay for, and how, and who pays it for whom, No matter how you cut the cake, given our current state of development, at some point you have to say X person dies in spite of their will because either they can’t afford to live or because his can’t”. So, are you* going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?
Motivated Continuing and Motivated Stopping? But accusing someone of that would be incurring in the Genetic Fallacy...
Here are two excellent examples of what you just explained, as per the Fiction Identity Postulate:
*Doom, Consequences of Evil as the “bad draft”, and this as the done-right version.
*Same for this infuriating Chick Tract and this revisiting of it (it’s a Tear Jerker)
*And everyone is familiar with the original My Little Pony works VS the Friendship Is Magic continuity.
… That’s basically what many theists object to Yudkowsky’s sequences. “There are inferential gaps”.
What, you mean like in Gangs of New York?
Could you please give more links to the stuff that helped you form these opinions? I’m very interested in this, especialy in explaining the peculiar behaviour of this generation’s youth as opposed to that of the Baby Boomers when they were the same age. After all, it’s irrational to apply the same tactics to a socipoloitical lanscape that’s wildly different from the one in which these tactics got their most spectacular successes. Exiting the mind-killing narratives developed in bipartidist systems and finding the way to rethink the problems of this age from scratch is a worthy goal for the rationalist project, especially in a “hold off on proposing solutions”, analyze-the-full-problem-and-introduce-it-from-a-novel-angle sense. Publications such as, say, Le Monde Diplomatique, are pretty good at presenting well-researched, competently presented alternative opinions, but they still suffer a lot from “political leanings”.
I know we avoid talking politics here because of precisely its mind-killing properties, able to turn the most thoughtful of agents into a stubborn blind fool, but I think it’s also a good way of putting our skills to the test, and refine them.
I dunno man, maybe it’s a confusion on my part, but universal health coverage for one thing seems like a good enough goal in and of tiself. Not specifically in the form of a State-sponsored organziation, but the fuction of everyone having the right to health treatments, of no-one being left to die just because they happen not to have a given amount of money at a given time, I think that, from a humanistic point of view, it’s sort of obvious that we should have it if we can pay for it.
Really? How so?
Terence Tao would have said this is the difference between a “mathematical problem” and a “real life problem”. Kinda like a “treasure hunt” compared to actual archeological activity: you know wits are going to be more important than brute-strength ugly methods… although IRL Brute Strength and ugly approximations are what you end up using the most.
Why do people commit mathematical mistakes? What are the mechanisms behind them?
… I like the way you talk. This goes a long way into explaining the same person saying “homosexuality is not a choice” and “I have been with qute a few straight guys”, as well as the treatment bi people get as “fence-sitters” and the resentment they generate by having an easier time in the closet.
It points to where the ripe bananas are, huh? Thanks, that was clarifying.
I feel obliged to point out that Socialdemocracy is working quite well in Europe and elsewhere and we owe it, among other stuff, free universal health care and paid vacations. Those count as “hidden potentiality of the real.” Which brings us to the following point: what’s , a priori, the difference between “hidden potentiality of the real” and “unreal”? Because if it’s “stuff that’s actually been made”, then I could tell you, as an engineer, of the absolutely staggering amount of bullshit patents we get to prove are bullshit everyday. You’d be amazed how many idiots are still trying to build Perpetual Motion Machines. But you’ve got one thing right: we do owe technology everything, the same way everyone ows their parents everything. Doesn’t mean they get all the merit.
Reversed Stupidity?
I can’t tell if you’re joking...
More like it’s potentially corrupting, but yeah, that too.