Ask HN: Design a government from scratch, how would it look?

In regards to the single point of failure, I've got no real answer except that governments have scaled well so far. However, this answer doesn't deal with the fact that so far we've always had other governments to compare ourselves to, which keeps the population in a healthy state of mild envy.

Loss of control is a big issue, and not one that's going to go away any time soon. To take the extreme case, there is basically zero chance that any country currently under sharia law will adopt this form of government, because it gives human science the right to veto Mohammad's commands. Likewise, any attempt to join Canada and the USA will suffer from dissidents who don't like to give up their national character.

It is inevitable that large governments will be less attentive to the needs of individual communities, but not to the degree that it is often expected. The simple fact that 200 million + people can have one president indicates that social stability is more important that actually being able to make an impact on the people who rule the country.

I don't really feel like I've given a very good answer to your question. Perhaps the only route to world government is to start with a small country, demonstrate that it works better than the current forms of democracy, and aggressively support national revolutions during times of world turmoil. Because the fourth branch of government is based on independently verifiable science, it wouldn't be too difficult to set up an international confederation of government science. The social laws of different countries would tend to converge simply because everyone would be working from the same data and the same conclusions, and hopefully after fifty years or so the international confederation would collude to vote through policies of non-aggression in their respective countries.

So, yeah, the linchpin in the system - the property that allows it to work across national borders - is that government policies would be able to be verified and tested using internationally-standard science.

Let's say that we're playing with the idea that abortion is murder. You say that government shouldn't be able to affect people having abortions because it is a matter of "personal conviction." However, murder denotes killing a living being and, as you stated above, governments exist to "to allow us to live in peace with people we've never met before..."

Now the question becomes is a fetus a living being? OR at what point does it become a living being? Someone needs to make these decisions and for lack of a better option, people turn to the government because if they think that the fetus is a living being then the government would need to protect it.

You have proven that government should absolutely be involved when someone wants to have an abortion because it is no longer a person's personal convictions if she is going to murder another person.

(Disclaimer: I'm not saying how I feel about the subject, just pointing out your arguments.)

First, "what time is it?" There's lots of cases where a single centralized authority can provide definite and concrete advantages.

Second, ultimately, every system of authority (and note that I'm using the word in a very different sense now) is built on a foundation of a threat of death. And that kernel should be held at as much of a remove, as carefully controlled as is possible. Introducing "failover" regulators means that you now have multiple parallel columns of authority, and each basic threat of death needs it's own system of control. That strikes me as nightmarish.