5 ms·

> Picking and choosing where your taxes go a terrible idea, because government isn't à la carte And why not ? Our current system stems from a different age, w

• pdkl95 10y ago
  > And why not ? Because you are advocating for the government to fail due to under funding. Do you not realize that every piece of government has some group that wishes it didn't exist? You are advocating for the de-funding of everything. Living with other people requires compromise. We cannot all have the government we want, because most of those governments are contradictory. Instead, the goal should be to guarantee the ability to change government. > regardless of competence That's a feature, not a bug, because there isn't (and never will be) agreement on the definition of "competence". In the past, for example, tests of "competence" were used to disenfranchise people. > best tech You cannot define this either. > Why not write them in a special programming language I would love to have laws written in a strict, machine-checkable grammar. "Legalease" already approaches this idea, with many defined terms and standard formats for some things. There is a lot of room for improvement, of course. > executed against facts from reality ... no judges, lawyers and lawmakers You should really hang out with lawyers more, because this sentence is wildly detached from reality. You're pretending that "facts" and the interpretation of how the law applies to them are (or ever could be) some sort of automatic process. A large part of trials is deciding what the facts are, as there is often disagreement about that. > coming from sensors Sensors fail. It requires interpretation and argument to decide how to handle those situations. > input facts, click and get the judgement. Automatic judgment of law is terrifying. Consider that from the perspective of people that don't have your level of privilege. Minority groups regularly have to fight democratically created prejudices, and human judgment - judges, juries, etc - that has the option to not apply the law is an important safety mechanism. > Use collaboration and communication tools like Github to write the laws. Sounds great. When are you introducing these tools to your local government? Also... "collaboration and communication" to decide how to run society is called politics. I strongly recommend participating in that process; just remember that you may have to do a lot of remedial work before everybody else is ready for tools like git. > Log the public opinion and gather feedback in real time. I'd love to have that. If you know of a way to do that which isn't trivially broken and doesn't allow coercion by employers or other people in positions of power, do share it. It would solve a lot of problems. Right now, we already try to do this in the voting process; adding in the internet or a phone "app" is guaranteed to create problems. For an explanation of why, see this[1] talk by Andrew Appel (CS prof at Princeton). -- I suspect you're suffering from a tech-focused variation of the Just World Fallacy[2]. Reality just doesn't work that cleanly, even when you use computers. In fact, computers have a nasty tendency to amplify and automate mistakes and prejudices, just like they can amplify and automate useful work. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
  • witty_username 10y ago
    > Automatic judgment of law is terrifying. Consider that from the perspective of people that don't have your level of privilege. Minority groups regularly have to fight democratically created prejudices, and human judgment - judges, juries, etc - that has the option to not apply the law is an important safety mechanism. In other words, are you saying the system might be prejudiced? But even so, as long as it's less prejudiced than humans (notoriously bad), it'll be better.
    • pdkl95 10y ago
      > In other words, are you saying the system might be prejudiced? Every system has prejudices and biases. > But even so, as long as it's less prejudiced than humans (notoriously bad), it'll be better. I'll take a system that has less prejudice, but first show that it actually is less prejudiced in practice. Non-human systems "bake in" and automate the biases of the creator of the system, and it is very hard to create a system that isn't full of preconceptions, misunderstandings, and bad data.
  • delegate 10y ago
    The point I'm trying to make is that our society runs on a myriad of apps and databases, yet the operating environment in which these apps run is maintained by a bunch of people in suits, using a set of laws written in human language, elected by the majority vote, prone to corruption, emotions, insanity, etc... We will need an operating environment which can distribute the limited resources available on the planet in a sustainable way if we are to survive as a species. People can and want to govern themselves - most of our needs are local and can be solved locally without having to rely on a centralised entity to distribute money and decisions for us. We can replace politicians with discussion forums and instant votes, instant decisions. I see the role of 'government' as an institution which creates and runs campaigns for various 'global' societal issues, not as an institution which 'thinks' for everyone else. Anyway, I know this is extreme idealism and I'm probably wrong in many ways, but as I said, eventually this system will be developed, it would help if we start thinking about it, because we're kind of running out of time ... Thanks for the conversation.
• asdfzxc 10y ago
  >Let citizens have the "Society" app on their phones and let them up/down vote serious things too r/writing prompts had a scenario like that. Where a nuke is incoming and a majority of the citizenry has to approve a retaliatory strike, via an app of course. Also, I'm hitting myself in the face right now.
  • erikpukinskis 10y ago
    Interesting. But unrealistic. The "do we all trust Todd to launch a retaliatory strike?" app would've already made the rounds long before that.