Could futarchy be used to run a business? Setting up a business is much easier than taking over the government of a country!
Bets could be proposed like: "If policy X is adopted then the share dividend on such and such a date will be higher than if it is not adopted". Bets with the highest support could then be adopted and over time, the share dividend would steadily increase.
Isn't it already, in some sense? The whole idea of a futarchy is shareholders voting for their self-interest so it also works in the interests of everyone else. This is pretty much what goes on in companies where shareholders get a vote proportional to their shares held.
I discussed this recently elsewhere: https://utilitarian.quora.com/Utility-monsters-arent-we-all I'm glad I'm not the only one who's thought of this.
If, off the top of your head, you thought of a solution to a problem that's existed for hundreds of years and had lots of smart people look at it, it probably was thought up by someone else already and found wanting.
Ranking is subject to Arrow's impossibility theorem.
Having voters assign candidates a score is still covered by the Gibbert-Satterthwaite theorem.
Yeah, sorry, I don't know what I was thinking.
I used to think about self-proclaimed selfishness in this way all the time, but now I think I "get" the doctrine of selfishness. For instance, the answer to the first mischevous question is actually "because I get personal happiness from preaching selfishness, and that vastly overshadows any happiness I could instead get from a single person's altruism". The answer to own life vs. human species is "because a guilt-ridden life wouldn't maximise my personal happiness", and so on.
There's a solution I always thought of since young, that is instead of letting voters vote for a single candidate of their choice, let them assign each candidate a score and the representation will be defined by the total score of a party's candidates.
Perhaps it would be better to let voters rank the candidates instead, and assign each rank a well-defined score, if directly assigning a score is to arbitrary.
are we morally obligated to have children, and as many as we can?
Cost of a first-world child is.... checks random Google result $180,000 to get them to age 18. Cost of saving a kid in Africa from dying of Malaria is ~$1,000.
Right now having children is massively selfish, because there's options that are more than TWO magnitudes of order more effective. It'd be like blowing up the train in order to save the deaf kids from the original post :)
Not necessarily. A full argument would consider the opportunities available to a child you raise -- it's perfectly possible for a single first-world child to be a more productive than 180 kids in Africa.
There's also the counter-point (to my previous point) that having children discourages other people from having children, due to the forces of the market (greater demand for stuff available to children => greater costs of stuff available to children). Of course, the effect on demand is spread out to stuff other than just stuff available to children, so overall this does not cause an equal and opposite reaction.
If you successfully teach your child to be utilitarian, effective altruist, etc., though, the utility of both previous points are dwarfed by this (the second point is dwarfed because the average first-world child probably wouldn't pick up utilitarianism, EA). I'm not sure what the probability of a child picking up stuff like that is (and it would make one heck of a difficult experiment), but my guess is that if taught properly it would be likely enough to dwarf the utility of the first two points.
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Goodness, that's quite a few of Baez's checkboxes ticked. Is there any chance he's making fun?
Yep, he says so explicitly here: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22578/can-black-holes-be-created-on-a-miniature-scale#comment52219_22601