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The problem is so many government decisions can't be rolled back, like military, treaty, supreme court appointments, some environmental regulations... You'd ha

by VLM 10y ago

The problem is so many government decisions can't be rolled back, like military, treaty, supreme court appointments, some environmental regulations... You'd have to change everything else and every other country first to tolerate a "by bad, we're gonna redo" attitude and then implement "my bad, redo". An interesting simpler direct majority rule scheme is to halt elections completely and use jury selection techniques to select decision makers. What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths. A government completely of jury duty/draft would be far more effective than the one we have, which is probably why no one in power wants it.

aninhumer 10y ago
>What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths. I think far more likely these people would mostly just end up taking advice from whichever experts are left further down the hierarchies, who would then effectively run the country.
- VLM 10y ago
  OK, I'm not saying no, but you'd need to explain how that's different than the current situation other than the top leadership would be less crazy and less corrupt on average. Or aside from being different, how would having better leadership make the situation actively worse. Surely you can't be implying we have subject matter experts running the country now. Or that the subject matter experts we do have from law and show business who are in charge now are only in charge of their areas of expertise specifically law or show business? I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with having congress leading the American Bar Association, its just that having lawyers in charge of, say, nuclear power plants, is about as dumb as having plumbers in charge of source code.
amalcon 10y ago
So, using the US Federal government as an example, the sociopaths would need to convince 600-ish random people to do what they want on a continuous basis. Currently, the sociopaths need to convince ~100M random people to do what they want once every two years. The former might be superior, but it's not obviously so.

by VLM 10y ago

aninhumer 10y ago

>What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths. I think far more likely these people would mostly just end up taking advice from whichever experts are left further down the hierarchies, who would then effectively run the country.

VLM 10y ago
OK, I'm not saying no, but you'd need to explain how that's different than the current situation other than the top leadership would be less crazy and less corrupt on average. Or aside from being different, how would having better leadership make the situation actively worse. Surely you can't be implying we have subject matter experts running the country now. Or that the subject matter experts we do have from law and show business who are in charge now are only in charge of their areas of expertise specifically law or show business? I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with having congress leading the American Bar Association, its just that having lawyers in charge of, say, nuclear power plants, is about as dumb as having plumbers in charge of source code.

amalcon 10y ago

So, using the US Federal government as an example, the sociopaths would need to convince 600-ish random people to do what they want on a continuous basis. Currently, the sociopaths need to convince ~100M random people to do what they want once every two years. The former might be superior, but it's not obviously so.