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thomblake comments on Prediction is hard, especially of medicine - Less Wrong
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Comments (47)
Upper middle class and the wealthy do this quite a bit, even in countries with universal healthcare.
Why in the world would I? I don't care very much about other people's grandfathers, why should they care about mine? I'm indirectly willing to kill quite a few people to save my own life or that of my family. Even my friends are each worth more than one life to me, going of revealed preferences.
Also you are forgetting that the purpose of the state is basically to serve the desires of its citizens, it is not a global utility maximizer. That citizens of a country would cooperate for selfish gain is hardly unheard of. Also we care more about people in our in-group more than people in our out-group. Many different people identify these by culture, subculture, company, religion, citizenship, ideology, language, profession, nationality or language.
Poor people in Africa are far. We feel more idealistic and more moral thinking about helping them. We get more brownie points of signalling we wish too or will help them than by helping local poor people. But we are ironically less likley to do anything for their benefit, since that is mostly a near action. We more accurately perceive that local poor people are sometimes nasty but we end up helping them more anyway.
Also when thinking about helping people in far places we are less even likley to be pragmatic about the best way to acheive this. Considering how much we fail even at helping those around us this can be a dispiriting.
You should read "The great Charity Storm". We systematically overspend stupidly on education, healthcare and helping poor people.
(mind-killed)
That's an interesting notion. I would have thought that the purpose of the state is to oppress its people, and that modern governments are so much nicer because checks and balances / political infighting cause them to be ground to a near-halt.
I should have said the supposed or stated purpose of a state is to serve the desires of its citizens. Maybe I should have been even more fancy and disguised "desires" as rights. Most people vote and behave like the government is the default engine for doing good as they define it, so it didn't seem to controversial to describe it that way in this context.
You are obviously correct that government's role (purpose is the wrong word to use) is to oppress its people. Government is nothing but a territorial monopolist of violence, though few people explicitly think about it that way. However it can sometimes be useful to be oppressed.
Also generally I'm of the opinion that in the long run formalized check and balances don't really work. It seems pretty unlikely that anything like a stable equilibrium of actual power relations can be enforced by something as weak and easily worked around and gamed as laws or constitutions. Many Western Democracies don't have a strong separation of powers formally and don't seem any more or less nice. Now while this may seem like a trivial difference, but it really isn't. It basically means that formal definitions of the balance of power are for example unable to contain changes in actual power ratios be they caused by technology, culture or economics.
Keeping the polite fiction however works together with other aspect of "democracy" to convince its citizens it is legitimate. Much like divine right was a polite fiction with the same function in a different time. It seems to me very likley that that the reason democracy seems nicer is because it is much more capable of convincing and indoctrinating citizens that it is legitimate and good. A government capable of perfect brainwashing would never need to be mean at all to maintain power.
While I can agree there is a lot of political infighting isn't this more a result of the iron law of oligarchy than anything designed on purpose?
Meh. I'm agnostic about whether it was "on purpose". Humans revolt and so select for governments that aren't revolting.
I'm not sure how the iron law of oligarchy results in political infighting, and i'm skeptical of the iron law of oligarchy, but I don't think that's particularly relevant if we agree about the facts on the ground.
Well, nothing works in the indefinite long run, unless your goal is entropy. It does seem to stop a lot of legislation from being passed / sticking in the US, which I suppose is only a benefit from a particular perspective.
I think that selection filter is much weaker than most imagine. The poor don't revolt.
Agreed.