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6 Post author: OrphanWilde 21 February 2013 04:24PM

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Comment author: Document 22 February 2013 04:33:43PM *  1 point [-]

That (along with this semi-recent exchange) reminds me of a stupid idea I had for a group decision process a while back.

  • Party A dislikes the status quo. To change it, they declare to the sysop that they would rather die than accept it.
  • The sysop accepts this and publicly announces a provisionally scheduled change.
  • Party B objects to the change and declares that they'd rather die than accept A's change.
  • If neither party backs down, a coin is flipped and the "winner" is asked to kill the loser in order for their preference to be realized; face-to-face to make it as difficult as possible, thereby maximizing the chances of one party or the other backing down.
  • If the parties consist of multiple individuals, the estimated weakest-willed person on the majority side has to kill (or convince to forfeit) the weakest person on the minority side; then the next-weakest, until the minority side is eliminated. If they can't or won't, then they're out of the fight, and replaced with the next-weakest person, et cetera until the minority is eliminated or the majority becomes the minority.

Basically, formalized war, only done in the opposite way of the strawman version in A Taste of Armageddon; making actual killing more difficult rather than easier.

A few reasons it's stupid:

  • People will tolerate conditions much worse than death (for themselves, or for others unable to self-advocate) rather than violate the taboo against killing or against "threatening" suicide.
  • The system may make bad social organizations worse by removing the most socially enlightened and active people first.
  • People have values outside themselves, so they'll stay alive and try to work for change rather than dying pointlessly and leaving things to presumably get worse and worse from their perspective.
  • Prompting people to kill or die for their values will galvanize them and make reconciliation less likely.
  • Real policy questions aren't binary, and how a question is framed or what order questions are considered in will probably strongly affect the outcome and who lives or dies, which will further affect future outcomes.
  • A side might win after initially taking casualties, or even be vindicated a long time after their initial battle. They'd want their people back, but keeping backups of people killed in a battle would make "killing" them much easier psychologically. It might also put them at risk of being restored in a dystopia that no longer respects their right to die. (Of course, people might still be reconstructed from records and others' memories even if they weren't stored anywhere in their entirety.)
  • The system assumes that there's a well-defined notion of an individual by which groups can be counted, and that individuals can't be created at will to try to outnumber opponents (possibly relevant: 1, 2, 3, 4).
  • People will immediately reject the system, so the first thing anyone "votes" for will be to abolish it, regardless of how much worse the result might be.
  • If there's an afterlife (i.e. simulation hypothesis), we might just be passing the buck.
  • I'm not sure it's a good idea to even public(al)ly discuss things like this.
Comment author: Document 22 February 2013 08:37:16PM *  0 points [-]

Actually, I think I'm now remembering a better (or better-sounding) idea that occurred to me later: rather than something as extreme as deletion, let people "vote" by agreeing to be deinstantiated, giving up the resources that would have been spent instantiating them. It might be essentially the same as death if they stayed that way til the end of the universe, but it wouldn't be as ugly. Maybe they could be periodically awakened if someone wants to try to persuade them to change or withdraw their vote.

That would hopefully keep people from voting selfishly or without thorough consideration. On the other hand, it might insulate them from the consequences of poor policies.

Also, how to count votes is still a problem; where would "the resources that would have been spent instantiating them" come from? Is this a socialist world where everyone is entitled to a certain income, and if so, what happens when population outstrips resources? Or, in a laissez-faire world where people can run out of money and be deinstantiated, the idea amounts to plain old selling of votes to the rich<strike>, like we have now</strike>.

Basically, both my ideas seem to require a eutopia already in place, or at least a genuine 100% monopoly on force. I think that might be my point. Or maybe it's that a simple-sounding, socially acceptable idea like "If someone would rather die than tolerate the status quo, that's bad, and the status quo should be changed" isn't socially acceptable once you actually go into details and/or strip away the human assumptions.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 22 February 2013 08:30:24PM 0 points [-]

Can this be set up in a round robin fashion with sets of mutually exclusive values such that everyone who is willing to kill for their values kills each other?

Comment author: Document 22 February 2013 08:44:18PM 0 points [-]

Maybe if the winning side's values mandated their own deaths. But then it would be pointless for the sysop to respond to their threat of suicide to begin with, so I don't know. I'm not sure if there's something you're getting at that I'm not seeing.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 26 February 2013 06:45:39PM 0 points [-]

"I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there... any more than there is for you. Malcolm... I'm a monster.What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done. "

  • The Operative, from Serenity. (On the off-chance that somebody isn't familiar with that quote.)
Comment author: RomeoStevens 22 February 2013 09:31:56PM *  0 points [-]

I'm thinking if you do the matchup's correctly you only wind up with one such person at the end, whom all the others secretly precommit to killing.

...maybe this shouldn't be discussed publicly.

Comment author: Document 22 February 2013 10:14:12PM 0 points [-]

I don't think the system works in the first place without a monopoly on lethal force. You could work within the system by "voting" for his death, but then his friends (if any) get a chance to join in the vote, and their friends, til you pretty much have a new war going. (That's another flaw in the system I could have mentioned.)

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