|
Democracy producing objectively bad outcomes for the majority of people, being captured by special interest groups, and so on isn't really a bug in democracy that can be corrected through Doing Democracy Directly; it's a feature. Democratic systems' main purpose is to provide legitimacy to leaders and hopefully safeguard the processes through which leaders are elected and policies are made. That only guarantees good results if the electorate is wise and informed: therefore Kant and the other enlightenment thinkers who promoted democracy saw public civic education as an ineluctable part of democracy. Now note that what the 20th century conflicts of ideology showed is that more education, wealth and wisdom doesn't lead to moral progress in any sort of direct way: instead it leads to more sophisticated forms of political manipulation and violence. The work on using adtech and social media manipulation to manipulate public opinion in the 21st century is a direct evolution of the governance techniques of 'democracy'. In a direct democracy you're just going to see the equivalent of Instagram influencers, hashtag communities on Twitter and Youtubers becoming the main nexus of political activity: in other words demagoguery writ large and with infinite different special-interest groups. There is no solution to this problem. Either you go for a representative model and try to choose better leaders, which might be possible if the above special-interest groups weren't mobilised against it, or you go for a more autocratic model and try to impose a specific vision of what 'democracy' means on people (this seems to work okay, but it's fragile), or you go full autocrat and risk the people with power being corrupted by it. Political systems are made of people, and people tend to be less-than-perfectly wise and easily corruptible. There is a political system which aims to give power only to people who are wise and incorruptible: it's called aristocracy (in the original sense of aristeia, rule by the best). In times of crisis giving supreme power to a solid, ideologically-consistent dictator is pretty popular, and it's worked out okay for some countries (Salazar in Portugal comes to mind). But dictatorships are... mostly not good for people. Talking about an absolute solution to corruption is like talking about an absolute solution to conflict: it's impossible and the only way to achieve it is by repression in a different form. What you're asking for is for political leaders who are always wise and political processes that are impossible to subvert. You can make leaders more accountable; you can make policies easier to understand and show support of or oppose; you can't make the populace in general make wise decisions. In general therefore the only way to achieve good governance is by having a strong, well-educated set of oligarchs in power; the only way to achieve good legitimacy is to give absolute power to people who probably don't know what they're doing. The two goals are opposed to one another, and are irreconcilable. e: For the American context, one of the least democratically-inclined presidents you had, FDR, who came from an elite political family and was criticised during his presidency and afterwards for doing his best to impose his will on Congress, is in retrospect considered one of the most effective at governing. On the other hand, 'I love bipartisanship' Obama, despite his equally elite education and background to FDR, achieved only a neutered version of one of his main political objectives (Obamacare) and acted in ways directly contradictory to his stated aims in other areas (foreign policy). Democracy and effectiveness are very rarely correlated. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Jul 5, 2020 |
#
¿
Jul 5, 2020 12:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 12:31 |
|
|
DrSunshine posted:It seems like we should just delegate all authority to an immortal and incorruptible philosopher god-king. Lacking that, we should therefore make pains to invent it. The immortal philosopher god-king sounds good: unfortunately we can't invent them because the inventors would bring their own biases to the process. Superman seems like he'd be a pretty good god-king to be honest, and given he's an alien he's not likely to fall prey to the same biases as an AI overlord. Failing that, maybe we should get started on making humanity into a proper superorganism with a hive mind? I think the assumption in the debate is that democracy is perfectible, though, and evidence would suggest that democracy is probably the least-perfectible of all political systems. This is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand you don't get the benefits of a benevolent dictatorship; on the other you don't get the problems of a genocidal single-party state. So we're arguing how you could improve democracy: I don't think the problem with American democracy is that it lacks points of entry into the process. There's a ton of ways to get involved in democratic processes in the UK and America, and it's pretty easy for any citizen of those countries to 'have a say'. Whether it effects any meaningful change is another story. The problem with both of these countries isn't that politicians don't listen to the people (they do, albeit in a distorted way), the problem is that they listen to the people that mattern to them and don't govern in the interests of the people. An autocratic regime is free to abuse the population, but they're also free to take unpopular and necessary decisions that most people don't understand the rationale behind. Ultimately, what is the goal of a state: to be responsive to the population's wants, or to provide them with what they need?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2020 15:08
|
|
|
Reveilled posted:So what do you think we should do? In the US context, because I'll sound less extreme there: Introduce something like the Second Bill of Rights to guarantee material security as part of the constitution. Make it possible to sue the government on all levels for failing to provide adequate material security to US citizens; i.e. make the social security net legally binding. Revise free speech so that inciting hatred isn't considered protected speech. In general, adopt a less permissive approach to freedom of speech. In particular, get rid of any corporations' "right" to free speech as US corporate law currently uses it. Reduce intellectual property protections, especially on medicine. Set up a medical board that can override patent protection of drugs in the public interest. Give it teeth. Commission a panel of public health researchers to look at the most effective scheme for healthcare in terms of cost/outcomes (in the US that might be something like nationalised health insurance, rather than a national health service) and introduce it. Systematise the ways people engage with policy formation - make it so that policymakers are explicitly forbidden from meeting representatives of special interest groups, whether those are campaigning groups or lobbyists, outside of public settings. Make breaches of lobbying rules punishable by anything from temporary suspension from office to impeachment, and introduce a review board that's staffed by career civil servants. Limit campaign funding to a much lower figure and make campaigns for general elections last only 6 months. Make public forums where people can heckle their representatives mandatory. Make the election of Congress proportional to votes in each state, rather than being tied to districts. Make access to voting legally enforceable and get rid of voter ID requirements. Get rid of the political appointments process for ambassadorships and other non-cabinet-level federal posts; make them controlled by appointment by career civil servants. Abolish the police. Replace them with community governance of crime with federal oversight. Look at land ownership and who profits from it. Break up land monopolies and redistribute them in the interests of the country and citizens. Aim to provide every citizen with adequate housing through a federal public works program to build social housing. Break up the big tech companies. Fund alternative platforms which are designed for the public interest rather than to get ad dollars. For that matter, introduce restrictions on how advertising is done, including targeting and manipulative programming. Make higher education free and curtail the private sector in education. Devise and introduce an overall industrial strategy for the US economy, and use the mechanisms of the state to ensure that the private sector falls in line with national strategic priorities. Do this by reference to the material needs of citizens rather than mere consultation with industry leaders. Introduce mandatory national service, either in the civil service or the military, and make that national service focused on providing real benefits to other citizens, not just pointless make-work. Reason being that it prevents the military being dominated by right-wingers, and helps create a sense of solidarity between Americans of wildly different economic backgrounds, which has largely been dismantled by neoliberalism. --- Generally, change the key institutions of the state to make them act in the material interests of the people, and put the state back in control of the private sector rather than vice versa. Make the institutions of the state not merely liberal democratic, but rather social democratic mechanisms that are prepared to intervene frequently to ensure people enjoy basic rights. Once all that's done, maybe you need to start talking about how you can revise the democratic processes. Until then you're just going to empower fascists by giving them an even louder voice. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Jul 6, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2020 01:20
|
|
|
-Blackadder- posted:
With regard to strictly scientific topics like global warming which are self-evident from collecting enough data, sure, you could probably get a machine to use that information and make policy recommendations - but I'm not sure what the advantage would be over just hearing from scientists. If anything politicians would be less likely to listen to the machine than to human scientists. When you're talking about a Artificial General Superintelligence, you're talking about a machine that is able to formulate its own goals and strategies for accomplishing those goals. If you want a governance-bot, that necessarily needs to include heuristics for what a good society, or a good process in society, looks like. And that's where the issue with inventor bias comes in. If we take the people working on the most advanced applied technologies at the moment - and I've worked with them before - then they will probably: * Have faith in established institutions (because they've benefited from them in the past), particularly big tech and academia * Be unwilling to make large sweeping changes except in areas where there's overwhelming evidence in support of the advantages (e.g. global warming), because they benefit from the current system * Have a general political compass going from soft-left technocrats to libertarianism If you build that into a governance-bot, then the best-case scenario is a thousand years of DNC rule. Reason itself is delineated by the social environment in which it's located, c.f. Madness and Civilisation, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and The Order of Things. The obvious solution, we might think, is to let an AGI figure out its own heuristics and set its own goals. In fact this kind of strategising is implied by the General Intelligence concept. However: without emotions it's unclear that reason has a purpose, and I've read about research by DeepMind that aims to give 'emotions' to bots for precisely this reason: as Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. So, it's unclear that a "purely rational" AGI is possible, and even if it were then we probably wouldn't want it. Governance requires a value system to rank different priorities against one another. Do you prioritise funding healthcare or the military in a situation where there are global threats but also abyssmal healthcare at home? Do you want more democratic governance even if it results in worse outcomes? Do you want to limit the ability of large media organisations to propagandise even if this impacts on normal citizens' freedom of speech? I think the temptation of an AGI ruler is that of liberal technocracy: that through reasoning and rigour we can reach the best possible outcome, through enough intellectual application, solve any problem. I used to date a civil servant who was trained to think like this, and it is infuriating to explain to people with a faith in reasonable governance that their masters are motivated by ideology and the passions, not by reason, and therefore their day-to-day work is rationalisation of a political project.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2020 02:23
|
|