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Good and ethical behavior should be incentivized, both on short and long timescales. It is obviously not enough to punish the wrongdoers, because our laws don't
by uoaei 9y ago
Good and ethical behavior should be incentivized, both on short and long timescales. It is obviously not enough to punish the wrongdoers, because our laws don't prevent everyone from killing, discriminating, or exploiting their fellow people.
Currently so much rides on mere survival that the only effective objective function we have to consider our actions is that of money. Either the capitalist system needs to be diversified to encourage multi-objective optimization wrt quality of life across all lifeforms, or it needs to be dismantled and another form of cooperation that directly incentivizes helping your fellow human/animal survive should be installed.
Think about it like this: rather than writing some complicated optimization algorithm that sometimes climbs hills and sometimes descends them according to some arbitrary judgment scheme, we redesign the objective function so that all ethical behavior lies along stable manifolds. We can effectively hack human psychology by exploiting its predispositions to incentivize ultimately good behavior.
This "good behavior" doesn't even necessarily need to be complex or controversial: something as simple as the Golden Rule would likely be sufficient.
E: to add that I recently attended a contemporary art exhibition where one of the exhibits was the introduction of a new cryptocurrency called Kineticoin[1], which supposedly awards artistic contributions to society. How exactly to distribute this value is up for debate, but it is a sorely needed one, IMO.
[1] https://kineticoin.weebly.com/ https://kineticoin.weebly.com/
- qazpot 9y agoI have a few questions for you Who gets to decide what is "Good" and "Ethical" behavior ? What exactly would be the "incentive" "Good" and "Ethical" behavior. ? You say that capitalism can be dismantled in favor of another form cooperation that directly incentivizes helping your fellow human survive. Is this not in direct contradiction the base animal instinct of self survival. The incentive would have to be huge in order to override this base instinct. You suggest Golden Rule as sufficient way to define "good behavior". But Golden Rule itself has shortcomings and criticism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Criticism). Do you have any sufficient argument against these criticism.
- liberte82 9y agoI like the Inverse Golden Rule - Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.
- logfromblammo 9y agoThat's the Silver Rule: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to others." Sometimes reformulated as "An it harm none, do as ye list."
- qazpot 9y agoUsing this rule A suicidal person can say "I don't want other people to save me from dying therefore I will not stop others from dying." A rich person can say "I do not want charity from others therefore I will not give charity to others."
- kiliantics 9y ago> Who gets to decide what is "Good" and "Ethical" behavior ? Why should any one person get to decide? Right now we have given the power over that decision to the worst people. I think a good first step is to recognise when someone has the power to incentivise behaviour and see whether they are using that power to incentivise negative behaviour. This is currently the case with most of the powerful institutions in our capitalist society. We do not live in a world of scarce resources. In most places there is more than enough food to go around, more than enough housing for everyone to be housed. We are forced into "survival mode" by the fact that wealthy people and institutions are hoarding resources and preventing access to them so that they can exploit us for profit. If we simply checked and limited the power of such institutions, allowing people the freedom to act in a less competitive manner, we would probably have more co-operation and a more ethical society. We've seen plenty of examples of this before.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ionised 9y ago> Is this not in direct contradiction the base animal instinct of self survival. What about the basic social animal instinct of co-operation and empathy?
- jchrisa 9y agoThis reminds me of a cryptocurrency approach I've been suggesting for years: allow anyone to mint coins any time, and move the scarcity into the transaction network: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/