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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

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Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#161

Post by pqtyw »

TFYS wrote: post #140
sethammons wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something. Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing? Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair? If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinc…

Education would probably be the answer. In a true democracy we would need to make sure everyone is well educated. Of course there are a lot of decisions that require very specialized knowledge that can't be taught to everyone, and in such cases it might be necessary to have limited participation or some kind of weighted voting.

Unfortunately that seems to be highly subjective and different people have a very different understanding of what "well educated" means.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#162

Post by martin-t »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #147
docsaintly wrote: post #5

This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.

Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.

Nobody said it's a conspiracy. It's simple specialization. Some people are good at productive positive-sum work, others are good at office politics, manipulation and scams. The latter are good at accumulating power to extract value from the former.

Imagine a world where workers decided how much to pay their assistant ("manager") according to how much tangential effort and overhead he saves them so they can focus on their core competency.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#163

Post by M95D »

Buttons840 wrote: post #38
roenxi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "exper…

One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utili…

> Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book.

Link?

> We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.

Open up a git for the book and let the people do PRs and bug reports. One file per article.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#164

Post by pqtyw »

esafak wrote: post #137
sethammons wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something. Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing? Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair? If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinc…

You instill civic virtue from a young age.

That's how totalitarian regimes maintain their grip on power as well. At the end of the day someone needs to define what "civic virtue" is, if its done top down well that might not necessarily work out that well (of course it might be the opposite but it seems like a very dangerous method).

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#165

Post by rcxdude »

andsoitis wrote: post #154
kiba wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed. You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, beca…

Land is a scarce resource. I don’t know that crating a system to wash that reality away is desirable.

Land value tax doesn't remove that, it mostly changes who benefits from that scarcity and more strongly incentivises using that scarce resource productively.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#166

Post by TFYS »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #156
TFYS wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities. All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.

Can you go into detail how your ideal system would work?

I don't have details. It'd need to be based on direct democracy, but for now we don't have any way to make good decisions efficiently with it. I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#167

Post by esafak »

pqtyw wrote: post #164
esafak wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You instill civic virtue from a young age.

That's how totalitarian regimes maintain their grip on power as well. At the end of the day someone needs to define what "civic virtue" is, if its done top down well that might not necessarily work out that well (of course it might be the opposite but it seems like a very dangerous method).

I don't know what you're talking about. What kind of civic participation do you see in North Korea?

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#168

Post by pqtyw »

esafak wrote: post #167
pqtyw wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how totalitarian regimes maintain their grip on power as well. At the end of the day someone needs to define what "civic virtue" is, if its done top down well that might not necessarily work out that well (of course it might be the opposite but it seems like a very dangerous method).

I don't know what you're talking about. What kind of civic participation do you see in North Korea?

I don't, you don't either, quite a few people in North Korea might view it differently.

My point is what methods do you use to "instil civic virtue"? How do you define it? And most importantly how do you prevent people from diverging from them?

Historically totalitarian societies were often quite good at instilling any kind of "virtue" you wanted. Free and democratic societies generally tend to struggle with the "instilling" part. (Of course to be fair there a few success stories (to an extent) like France)

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#169

Post by martin-t »

roenxi wrote: post #8
martin-t wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives. I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "exper…

And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone.

Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences.

The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs.

Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries.

I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess.

And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#170

Post by cindyllm »

martin-t wrote: post #169
roenxi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "exper…

And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone. Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences. The hard part is how to separate truth f…

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