wedrifid comments on "Progress" - Less Wrong

1 Post author: PhilGoetz 04 June 2012 03:51AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (69)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 June 2012 11:14:09AM 5 points [-]

That should also be correlated with e.g low corruption, good laws, low crime, good police, good courts, good neighbors / social norms, low poverty, etc. etc. It's much easier to see how these things can directly lower the chance of you being robbed or killed, while the relation to democracy seems less direct.

My comment was prompted by the concept of governments so far being 'useless', advocacy of democracy isn't especially intended.

The phenomenon of people not getting killed by other people much, and especially not getting killed by those with the most power is a remarkable achievement, given how humans and other animals usually behave. We can call our governments "useless" only in the sense of "Yay! We've managed to find a way to make the machinations of leaders to be irrelevant rather than a constant threat and net negative to the rest of the population!"

Comment author: DanArmak 04 June 2012 01:42:40PM 0 points [-]

Right, I didn't notice your comment wasn't about democracy specifically. Even if democracy is "as useless" (=as useful) as some alternatives, it wouldn't imply it is useless (=of no use) as e.g. having no formal government at all.