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Thank you for the well thought out reply! I think this is a good representation of how some Americans think about guns, at least in my experiences from Northern

Thank you for the well thought out reply! I think this is a good representation of how some Americans think about guns, at least in my experiences from Northern California up through the North Oregon Coast. As a working class yokel, I don't trust the Federal Government to act with my best interests in mind.

xelxebar 9y ago
Just throwing this out there, but do you trust yourself to be capable of protecting your best interests? The prisoner's dilemma is a pretty clear example where people "looking out for their own" ends up causing everyone to shoot themselves in the foot. There just a lot of situations where we are all individually better off by acting counter to our personal interests. Traffic congestion is a great, uncontroversial example I was just discussing in another thread. Lots of traffic problems come about because everyone is just trying to get home quickly without thinking of entire city's optimal traffic flow. If we all worked to maximize city traffic throughput instead of just getting where we want to go, we would actually end up getting home faster most of the time. However, it's not really reasonable to expect this of each other, so naively, we want a way to "hack the prisoner's dilemma". We want to make the selfish decision somehow correspond to the globally optimal decision. We want cleverly designed roads and traffic flow control. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of work to identify where such hacks are needed, even more so figuring out how to implement them well. My view of government's (ideal) role is to take on this "policy hacking" role. We want something to magically make Pareto Optima to also be a win situation for everybody. However, making policy is also part of the game, so there are hacks (e.g. the Constitution, etc.) in place to try and make people's personal interests align with making good policy. It's hacks all the way down. Sure, the system is buggy and runs on an old, crufty, legacy BIOS from the 1700s with a giant mess of spaghetti code hacks on top, but we're probably better off trying to fix this system's bugs than having to revert to Eniac and anarchy. Maybe we could do a rewrite??

xelxebar 9y ago

Just throwing this out there, but do you trust yourself to be capable of protecting your best interests? The prisoner's dilemma is a pretty clear example where people "looking out for their own" ends up causing everyone to shoot themselves in the foot. There just a lot of situations where we are all individually better off by acting counter to our personal interests. Traffic congestion is a great, uncontroversial example I was just discussing in another thread. Lots of traffic problems come about because everyone is just trying to get home quickly without thinking of entire city's optimal traffic flow. If we all worked to maximize city traffic throughput instead of just getting where we want to go, we would actually end up getting home faster most of the time. However, it's not really reasonable to expect this of each other, so naively, we want a way to "hack the prisoner's dilemma". We want to make the selfish decision somehow correspond to the globally optimal decision. We want cleverly designed roads and traffic flow control. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of work to identify where such hacks are needed, even more so figuring out how to implement them well. My view of government's (ideal) role is to take on this "policy hacking" role. We want something to magically make Pareto Optima to also be a win situation for everybody. However, making policy is also part of the game, so there are hacks (e.g. the Constitution, etc.) in place to try and make people's personal interests align with making good policy. It's hacks all the way down. Sure, the system is buggy and runs on an old, crufty, legacy BIOS from the 1700s with a giant mess of spaghetti code hacks on top, but we're probably better off trying to fix this system's bugs than having to revert to Eniac and anarchy. Maybe we could do a rewrite??