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>I'm worried because there is nothing in your voice that speaks to love, art, or beauty. Give me a break. Nobody talks about such things during a crime in prog

>I'm worried because there is nothing in your voice that speaks to love, art, or beauty. Give me a break. Nobody talks about such things during a crime in progress. All political programs promise to be the best way of bringing about what its adherents want. I'm not even talking about A or B or C being better. I'm saying it is undemocratic to be forced to choose option A, "democracy". >Any sort of idealized community in the desert or floating around on a barge is going to need an umbilical chord to the rest of us. You can't leave and start your own brand new world. This could have been said by an 18th century British bureaucrat too. The US was a noble experiment but it has failed, and, no, it's existence today doesn't contradict what I am saying. Tyranny was supposed to be kept at bay by a unique system of checks and balances + democratic representation. History shows that the US political elite has continually aggrandized itself instead. It's like a piece of software that is going to have terrible memory leaks no matter what. If you want a blazing fast app, you can't keep working with this setup. Hacking can certainly be making the best with what you have but totally ignoring the possibility of the best option being to scrap it all and start over. I'd think that the startup world would be comfortable with at least considering such ideas.

redblacktree 13y ago
> undemocratic to be forced to choose option A, "democracy". oh?
- praxeologist 13y ago
  Yes exactly. I mentioned that true democracy includes the ability to secede down to the level of the individual. What happens at our local knitting club? We take a vote on whatever and if I don't like it I can leave. I don't have to uproot my family and really leave because the knitting club has influence over only a very limited sphere. The "democracy" option besides moving to an authoritarian country is what I actually call "democratic majoritarian rule", so yes this contradicts what I really believe democracy is. There's no options besides this except taking another step backwards to some dictatorship or whatever.
  - notahacker 13y ago
    You can "secede down to the level of the individual" by leaving the country. Irrespective of whether the scope of territorial monopolies tends to go too far, it doesn't seem possible to have a civilized society filled with people who, having "seceded", refuse to accept the existence of any laws restricting their actions.
    - praxeologist 13y ago
      There's nowhere to go but the middle of the ocean if I don't want to live in a place that is either authoritarian or democracy-worshiping though. >refuse to accept the existence of any laws restricting their actions. I was trying to focus on our lack of ability to choose, not so much what I advocate, but I do not advocate a lawless society. A corollary to "right to secede down to the level of the individual"—which is a law/rule BTW—would be that other people can't arbitrarily take control of you and not let you secede. But what if there are disagreements? I try to approach this in a way that I feel is scientific. I think that we can discover an eminently "human" law but then still have a lot of variation in politics, maintain peace and prosperity with having a few fundamental rules dominate popular acceptance like democracy does now. I don't have time now to get into all of that but if you are genuinely curious I could help you learn.
      - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        If you want to live as if you're the only person in your own little world, I recommend you find another planet. This one is kind of inhabited. Perhaps Solaria?
saraid216 13y ago
Have you really looked at nothing besides America in order to draw this conclusion? America is easily one of the worst of the functioning democracies in the world. (Russia would be an example of a non-functioning democracy.) It's great to talk about how the US was a noble experiment and how it's all tyrannical and how it has a political elite, but keep in mind that the world learned from the US and then moved on. Poke through this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6661282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6661282 It's not democracy that's broken; it's the US.
- praxeologist 13y ago
  There's a large US audience here, many of whom still worship the nation as a "functioning democracy". I see you are talking about liquid democracy and I think that approach might not be perfect but would certainly be an improvement, maybe a very big one. If there is something else specific, point it out to me. What country is using liquid democracy though? What country is a "good/functioning democracy" right now in your opinion? I assume some European country will be pointed to, then I can still find slews of examples where the structural incentive problem is taking place and causing harm. Liquid democracy is the type of radically different idea that we ought to be able to experiment with. Introducing a web of trust and having a mechanism for recall or direct representation by individuals is an improvement over the popularity contests we hold in the US every 2/4/6 years. If you slap liquid democracy on the idea of geographic monopoly, you still have an inferior system, because it only outputs one thing, the A or B in a box. If I want A but the chain of delegates chooses B, I am still losing out. What if we could have a way to have both A and B as well as all minority opinions C .. Z be expressed? (as long as they don't break the code so to speak) Well, we already have this and it is called free markets. If I want soda, I go to an entity I and a bunch of other people have largely turned over power to control picking the best sodas: one of my local supermarkets. That is like the concept of handing over my votes to someone who can in turn give all those to someone they trust to represent them. Coke and Pepsi dominate as people's favorite choices, so they and their flavor variants occupy a lot of shelf space (think Earth's territory for the analogy). What if I want some guava soda or Jamaican ginger beer? Well, there might be some if there is enough demand in the area to make it profitable to carry it. Obviously, I expect people to have all sorts of objections here to comparing laws to flavors of sodas. I think the availability of all sorts of niche things though is a great example of how markets make the individual consumer "king" whereas "typical democracy" only has the empty promise that anyone can rule.
williamcotton 13y ago
>History shows that the US political elite has continually aggrandized itself instead. It's like a piece of software that is going to have terrible memory leaks no matter what. If you want a blazing fast app, you can't keep working with this setup. People aren't software running on a machine! The point isn't for an idealized system of government that functions like a "blazing fast app". You know who you sound like? "Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." "Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy." "The truth is that men are tired of liberty." > This could have been said by an 18th century British bureaucrat too. And yeah, maybe it fucking should have been said, and really loudly as well, because the real shitty thing about the USA is that it WAS built on top of the remains of an existing people, but the colonial setting is mainly tautological and I don't think it is a very strong argument against the tenants of the American Enlightenment.

redblacktree 13y ago

> undemocratic to be forced to choose option A, "democracy". oh?

praxeologist 13y ago
Yes exactly. I mentioned that true democracy includes the ability to secede down to the level of the individual. What happens at our local knitting club? We take a vote on whatever and if I don't like it I can leave. I don't have to uproot my family and really leave because the knitting club has influence over only a very limited sphere. The "democracy" option besides moving to an authoritarian country is what I actually call "democratic majoritarian rule", so yes this contradicts what I really believe democracy is. There's no options besides this except taking another step backwards to some dictatorship or whatever.
- notahacker 13y ago
  You can "secede down to the level of the individual" by leaving the country. Irrespective of whether the scope of territorial monopolies tends to go too far, it doesn't seem possible to have a civilized society filled with people who, having "seceded", refuse to accept the existence of any laws restricting their actions.
  - praxeologist 13y ago
    There's nowhere to go but the middle of the ocean if I don't want to live in a place that is either authoritarian or democracy-worshiping though. >refuse to accept the existence of any laws restricting their actions. I was trying to focus on our lack of ability to choose, not so much what I advocate, but I do not advocate a lawless society. A corollary to "right to secede down to the level of the individual"—which is a law/rule BTW—would be that other people can't arbitrarily take control of you and not let you secede. But what if there are disagreements? I try to approach this in a way that I feel is scientific. I think that we can discover an eminently "human" law but then still have a lot of variation in politics, maintain peace and prosperity with having a few fundamental rules dominate popular acceptance like democracy does now. I don't have time now to get into all of that but if you are genuinely curious I could help you learn.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      If you want to live as if you're the only person in your own little world, I recommend you find another planet. This one is kind of inhabited. Perhaps Solaria?

saraid216 13y ago

Have you really looked at nothing besides America in order to draw this conclusion? America is easily one of the worst of the functioning democracies in the world. (Russia would be an example of a non-functioning democracy.) It's great to talk about how the US was a noble experiment and how it's all tyrannical and how it has a political elite, but keep in mind that the world learned from the US and then moved on. Poke through this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6661282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6661282 It's not democracy that's broken; it's the US.

praxeologist 13y ago
There's a large US audience here, many of whom still worship the nation as a "functioning democracy". I see you are talking about liquid democracy and I think that approach might not be perfect but would certainly be an improvement, maybe a very big one. If there is something else specific, point it out to me. What country is using liquid democracy though? What country is a "good/functioning democracy" right now in your opinion? I assume some European country will be pointed to, then I can still find slews of examples where the structural incentive problem is taking place and causing harm. Liquid democracy is the type of radically different idea that we ought to be able to experiment with. Introducing a web of trust and having a mechanism for recall or direct representation by individuals is an improvement over the popularity contests we hold in the US every 2/4/6 years. If you slap liquid democracy on the idea of geographic monopoly, you still have an inferior system, because it only outputs one thing, the A or B in a box. If I want A but the chain of delegates chooses B, I am still losing out. What if we could have a way to have both A and B as well as all minority opinions C .. Z be expressed? (as long as they don't break the code so to speak) Well, we already have this and it is called free markets. If I want soda, I go to an entity I and a bunch of other people have largely turned over power to control picking the best sodas: one of my local supermarkets. That is like the concept of handing over my votes to someone who can in turn give all those to someone they trust to represent them. Coke and Pepsi dominate as people's favorite choices, so they and their flavor variants occupy a lot of shelf space (think Earth's territory for the analogy). What if I want some guava soda or Jamaican ginger beer? Well, there might be some if there is enough demand in the area to make it profitable to carry it. Obviously, I expect people to have all sorts of objections here to comparing laws to flavors of sodas. I think the availability of all sorts of niche things though is a great example of how markets make the individual consumer "king" whereas "typical democracy" only has the empty promise that anyone can rule.

williamcotton 13y ago

>History shows that the US political elite has continually aggrandized itself instead. It's like a piece of software that is going to have terrible memory leaks no matter what. If you want a blazing fast app, you can't keep working with this setup. People aren't software running on a machine! The point isn't for an idealized system of government that functions like a "blazing fast app". You know who you sound like? "Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." "Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy." "The truth is that men are tired of liberty." > This could have been said by an 18th century British bureaucrat too. And yeah, maybe it fucking should have been said, and really loudly as well, because the real shitty thing about the USA is that it WAS built on top of the remains of an existing people, but the colonial setting is mainly tautological and I don't think it is a very strong argument against the tenants of the American Enlightenment.