[FoRK] And then it dawned on me...

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 05:13:04PM -0600, Jeff Bone wrote:
> 	
> I'm not a libertarian / anarchist / whatever anymore.  At least, in  

I'm a pragmatic anarchist. Pragmatic in the sense that top-down
superpresonal organisation levels are a local (maybe global)
minimum with the current agent makeup. Interim stages (warlords)
are ugly, and hence such a grand-scale social experiment best
avoided.

However, as a pragmatic transhumanist anarchist I don't regard
current agent makeup as much of a constant, so things should 
improve in future. On the other hand, such radical technology
also empowers amplification of personal acts up to planetary scale,
which certainly can ruin your day.

On the third tentacle, milk of human kindness is still flowing
quite copiously (no trinitite in Manhattan), so I'm optimistic.
(Even if not, fireworks are fun).

> principle.  Observation:  people are in general chronically and  
> irreparably stupid, and we're doomed by mean regression.  There's  
> simply no way to aggregate stupidity that results in anything better  
> than stupidity --- market magic, wikinomics and the like  

Markets are not panacea. You don't need a lot of stupid agents
to ruin it for everybody. 

> notwithstanding.  Those mechanisms aren't additive;  they merely  
> nullify the subtractive effects of the baseline stupidity.  The  
> result of even those mechanisms isn't merely the best that we've  
> achieved so far, it's the best that *can be* achieved by any form of  
> non-coercive preference aggregation.

I'm too stupid to get that.
 
> I'm a technocrat!  We'd be better off under the benevolent  
> dictatorship of an enlightened, principled, motivated, selfless few,  
> or one.  In fact, if Eli's whole "friendliness" concept wasn't an  

Aargh. If anyone genuinely tries that, I'd be the first guy to 
drop a cluster of nukes on him.

> almost-impenetrably dense (by design!) self-referential piece of  
> brain damage --- if it was actually something that made sense and  
> could be achieved --- I'd be all for it.  Machines of loving grace  
> and all that.

Trivial, and you'd get the halting problem solved in for free.
 
> Practically, though, little changes.  It appears that under all known  
> mechanisms of allocating authority, those who get it shouldn't have  
> it, and those who should have it do not get it.  So given this, less  
> government's inherently better.  So pragmatically, status quo.
> 
> But damn, people are stupid.  Damn.

Let's say we make four-digit IQ and EQ a contagious disease, with
an incubation time in a hour, or so. 

If I could, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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