I also discovered that my comments are down voted into oblivion. ... I have to assume that my contributions to this forum are not yet of high enough quality.

This forum is better than most but has not achieved enlightenment (yet :-D). Some up- or down-voting happens on the basis of the quality of comments, but a lot just signals the agreement or disagreement with the views of the poster.

You basically proposed communism which magically lacked all the icky bits. That will get you a bunch of downvotes :-)

I am getting married in less than a month, and I just realized that the wedding is probably the Schelling point event of my life. Therefore, if I were to make a commitment to change something about myself, now is probably the time to do it. It seems to me that If I want to make a short term resolution to change something about myself, I should start on New Years Day, so that I can have that extra push of being able to say "I have not done X this year." However, If I want to make a long term change, the best time to do it is probably the wedding, since it is probably the Schelling point of events in my life.

So what are some useful commitments I can make in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?

One idea is to get a "Precommitment Journal", and commit to follow anything that I write down in there, but in that case, I have technically followed everything I have written in that non-existent journal, so that commitment does not really need a Schelling point start date.

I don't think land should be owned by people.

By whom should it be owned, then? Or to unpack the concept of ownership, who gets to farm, or mine, or build on a given piece of land, and how will it be decided? Is the answer going to again be "somehow"? You say I'm reading my vision into your words, but that's because I'm not seeing any vision in them.

We were talking about a new society, one that runs on rationality.

I am not seeing the rationality content here.

I'm leaving the rest unresponded to, because we're both of us well into politics-as-mindkiller territory here, and I don't think prolonging the discussion is going to be useful in this venue.

ETA: But it would be polite for me to respond to your direct question, why I don't agree with caps on individual wealth. Because every honestly earned dollar in someone's hands means that they created more than a dollar's worth of value in someone else's. That is what it is, to earn money. When people pay you for what you do, your financial worth is a measure of the value you have created for them. Why cap that?

Of course, there are dishonest people, but to take away everyone's supposed excess money as a remedy is to fine everyone for the deeds of a few. And there are the practical issues of people evading such regulations by emigrating or restructuring their affairs so as not to legally "own" the wealth that they actually have control over. The dishonest are at an advantage here.

I have heard (unsourced anecdote) that when you ask people what is the largest income anyone really needs, they generally name a figure about 10 times their own. Whatever their own income is.

If "greed" is defined as something like "behavior intended to increase one's own wealth", it seems that as long as a behavior has only one intent (which may not be the case), greed and "voluntary behavior intended to benefit another" are mutually exclusive by definition. However, if you care about whether it benefits others regardless of intent to do so, the answer may be quite different.

What exactly is "pro-social outcome"? Can you define it?

I haven't proposed a totalitarian state.

You are talking about a state that takes everything from everyone beyond what they "need". When I asked how my desire for a bigger house than I "need" would be met, this was the exchange:

What happens in this society, if I want a bigger house than the state thinks I need?

I don't know but I imagine that some kind of balanced utility function could be produced that could provide different resource allocation. e.g. bigger shelter (if requested).

"Totalitarian" is exactly the right word for this. This is a vision of the state giving and the state taking away, where all belongs to the state and personal property is to be justified by a plea of need.

One very fine idea I found was in a Howard Gardner interview for BigThink (scroll down to " What is the US getting wrong?" )

I don't agree with caps on individual wealth, and were I Swiss, I'd have voted against 1:12 even without seeing any of the so-called FUD. (You don't think it possible that any of the opposition was from people who simply judged it to be a bad idea for the society?) But something Gardner says later on I find worth quoting:

I think one of the good features about the United States—since I've been bashing it—is that it's built into our DNA to take a chance, and if we fail, to try again. ... I said [to East Asians asking for a recipe for creativity] you've got to try something out, try to get some other people to support you, and if it doesn't work, what can you learn from it?

Compare this succinct statement of why capitalism works so well, from a recent comment here:

The only reason capitalism works is that the losing experiments run out of money.

That brake on failure is really important. When someone decides to Do Something and commits their resources to it, if it doesn't work out, they have to stop. A government's ability to carry on regardless is in comparison almost unlimited. The government of the day have their jobs at risk, but nothing more.

There were times when I was meditating 4 hours per day. I think about the human body very differently than the average academic. That doesn't mean that academics don't do anything useful but they won't spend money on certain projects because they lack certain experiences. Teaching new phonological primitives takes years.

I'm wise enough to know that giving people like myself the power to allocate all money isn't the solution either. There are many things I don't understand.

I believe that monocultures are generally bad. It's important to have various institutions with different philosophies, world views and interests.

Just having more rational discourse about how to allocate NIH money is not enough. Centralized power is bad in principle.

Responsibility lies with the ones who act in a destructive way or the ones who coerce others to act destructively.

If that's the reigning philosophy I don't think humanity survives the next 200 years.

There are models of education where you become a partner once you understand the concepts.

So? You want to reduce the diversity of model of learning. I think diversity is good.

Last week I attended the Berlin Bachata Congress. Bachata is a dance. Organizing such a context means flying world class teachers from all over the world to Berlin and paying for a location in which to held the event. That costs money.

You just wouldn't get a comparable event by getting a bunch of people from Berlin who dance Bachata together and try to let them teach each other.

The event exist because on of the Bachata dancers in Berlin wanted to raise the level of Bachata in Berlin and organized it. He saw a need in the local community and filled it. Total budget of the event is probably something like 50000€. In total he made a profit but that's not why he organized the event.

It would be a lot more complicated if you would have to convince some centralized authority via a rational discourse that we should have a Berlin Bachata Congress.

We are, however, exploring here.

As far as exploring goes, good exploring is about describing how alternatives could work.

I agree with you. [...] What would be the point of an exploration if we remain stuck in the old paradigms.

No, I don't think you understand me. I'm not the person to advocate staying in old paradigms. It's just that being a heretic is hard work.

The argument that you are making isn't a new paradigm it's not much different from what Marx said 150 years ago. It's old. A new argument about that we have measurement about rich people having less empathy but otherwise it's all old and boring.

As far as what I wrote lately about my political philosophy the posts I wrote in http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jmt/some_tools_for_optimizing_our_media_use/ might be interesting for you.