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.
I guess that until competitive government becomes really feasible in a mass scale, this thought is very theoritical. Quite rationally, people want to cross the bridge when they come to it.
About the actual design, it's like Eliezer explained when people asked him about how he did his AI box thingy, there is no substitute for thinking hard. You really have to think about incentives of every person in every role in the whole structure.
Mencius short circuits this by assuming a corporate structure and says that since it works well enough in the real world, it would work in a sovereign structure also. This is a good argument from the outside view. Simple hierarchy is definitely a solution to Goodhart's law as I had mentioned in my post, but as Robin Hanson had pointed out in his comment, it feels like a cop-out.
I guess that until competitive government becomes really feasible in a mass scale, this thought is very theoritical.
One of the things I particularly like about the idea of competitive government is it gives you something practical to do now as an individual. Look around the world and consciously pick a country to live in based on the value offered by its government. Surprisingly few people do this but the few that do have been enough to give us the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, etc.
I think being an immigrant gives you a diffe...
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?