mattnewport comments on Mechanics without wrenches - Less Wrong

33 Post author: PhilGoetz 15 April 2009 08:09PM

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Comment author: mattnewport 16 April 2009 12:18:22AM *  0 points [-]

I sometimes tell people how I believe that governments should not be documents, but semi-autonomous computer programs. I have a story that I'm not going to tell now, about incorporating inequalities into laws, then incorporating functions into them, then feedback loops, then statistical measures, then learning mechanisms, on up to the point where voters and/or legislatures set only the values that control the system, and the system produces the low-level laws and policy decisions (in a way that balances exploration and exploitation).

Sounds like a reasonable description of how a free market works to me.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 16 April 2009 02:21:52AM *  0 points [-]

Abstractly; but I don't just mean feedback loops and learning mechanisms with people as the components. I mean that some laws (not the Constitution itself, which is short and very meta; but many state and federal laws) should be a running computer program, with feedback loops and learning mechanisms. Some legislators just need to understand the parameters of the system; those who want to write amendments would need to be computer programmers.