Is there somewhere where ideas like this are discussed intelligently?
A few thoughts
If the experiments in governance are atheoretical, then I'd expect most of them to be worse. Just as most random mutations in a complex organism are likely to be worse.
Experimentation has a cost, what is the expected benefit from experimenting with different forms of government. How is that expected benefit justified?
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of seasteading and competitive governments, I just find it disheartening when people don't want to try applying their brains to the problem of at least narrowing down the space of how governments should be designed.
Is there somewhere where ideas like this are discussed intelligently?
Hmm... Actually in most places, the host will be slightly biased towards their own ideas and will not really be engaging in discussing new ideas. In Matt's endorsement of unqualified reservations, he's suggesting a blog where the host almost never replies back to comments, but it is well written reactionary stuff.
...I just find it disheartening when people don't want to try applying their brains to the problem of at least narrowing down the space of how governments should be designed.
Patrissimo argue that we should try to design good mechanisms for governance rather than try and use the current broken mechanisms.
I agree, however we don't have a theoretical framework that we can use to evaluate different systems that are proposed. Ideally we would be able to crunch some numbers and show that a Futarchy responds to the desires/needs of the populace better than "voting for politicians who then make decisions" or anything else we come up with.
So we need to be able to do things like quantifying how well the system responds to the people. Pretending that humans are agents which have a utility function would seem like an obvious simplification to make in the model. We also need to formalise "being in charge".
I tend to formalise who has authority in a system as a number of pairings of people and posts. Posts might be the seat in the senate or the presidency, although we will want to expand this notion of post to look at all bureacracy and how they are filled.
One way a proposed mechanism would work would be through controlling the pairings. Futarchy suggests that we might look at other ways to make the mechanism work. This would be quite hard to model, we would have to model the incentives of the people making the prosperity indexes and the incentives of the market participants.
So we want a system that selects the people/post pairing that maximises the groups utility function, while assuming that the people in control of the post will maximise their utility and everyone else will try to (ab)use the mechanism to maximise their own utility.
Does this seem like the right track?