Comment on Applause Lights

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 16:26:12 GMT

In standard democracy, yes, that is the case.

Perfect democracy is pure majority rule. Through history we have learned that this is probably the worst possible idea for a form of government. The mob has no concern for those who are not in the mob, and the apathy of the crowd can lead to some horrific consequences for those in the minority.

This is why most democracies are not really democracies, but have strong constraints that boost the power of the weakest members to prevent them from being overruled on every decision, while still giving the majority the larger share of the power.

For example, in the US the democratic process is split between two houses, The House of Representatives, which is population based and represents majority rule, and The Senate, for which each state gets only two representatives regardless of population. That balances the power while still giving the majority the majority of the power.

It's constraints similar to this (everyone does it differently, the point is that you always need to do it) that allow democratically based systems to work. In the US we also put in a president to make sure things get done, and then went as far outside the democratic system as the founders were comfortable with to install the third constraint on the system - the courts.

It could work just fine if there were plenty of well thought out constraints on it, but "democracy" by itself probably would not work at all; it rarely ever does. Therefore, saying "democracy" without any intention of discussing it is clearly just an applause word. Either that, or the man was totally ignorant. Leave it to someone like that to require the absolute destruction of a major effort like AGI just to learn the pitfalls of democracy that have been learned over and over and over again.

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