All of Aussiekas's Comments + Replies

Aussiekas-10

Wow, note to self, never reply to comments not directly relating to the idea or adding to the conversation or seek to argue definitions. Will this get me negative karma too? I stand by my reply. If you refuse a jury then you also refuse to participate in your democracy out of individually selfish motives. Is that a wrong analysis to think the person who comes up with some excuse is doing so to benefit themselves and that the knock on effects of that are a negative indicator for democracy?

Tapping out.

Aussiekas-10

Ok, so aside from presentation and procedure, I haven't seen any objections to the idea of splitting up the three stages of government based decision making to better align itself with wide accepted proposals on LW to reduce cognitive bias in the modern practice of Science.

Takeaway message, use more dark arts or better frame arguments.

I don't care at all about the details here. That would have to be hashed out by the people in question to come up with they think is a fair system. The central idea I was considering would be the effect of removing electi... (read more)

5ChristianKl
You wrote a lot of useless details such as whether a committee as 30 or 40 members. You didn't write something about details of how power works that matter such as how experts get selected.
0ChristianKl
What specific biases do you mean?
2ChristianKl
Whose democracy definition are you using? The one of the ancient Greeks? To what extend does it matter whether our present system is democracy as they would have wanted democracy to happen? Why do you think that democracy as you define it is the most important thing?
2ChristianKl
You don't make a real argument of why it's good to split things up into three stages. There a lot of vague things that are not well defined so it's necessary to first get clear about what the actual argument is before I would more clearly say that I reject the system.
5Jayson_Virissimo
Try using the outside view: of all the people who conclude something similar to the above when their ideas are poorly received here, what fraction are actually right? If this fraction is low, definitely explore other hypotheses. Frankly, I find yet another plan for more rational governance without any any attempt at an implementation mechanism to be quite boring and not worth spending many clock cycles on. You do realize that there are people here that don't believe in democracy, right? These people are unlikely to be impressed by schemes to fix democracy with more democracy.
Aussiekas-20

People who skip out on jury duty - people who don't believe or want to engage in their democratic government and want to live in a fascist world run by dumb people. Not rational on a large scale, only rational in putting Ayn Rand style capitalistic individuality first. Ignores and derides collectivist cultures and people who place value over democracy above personal profit for not being just like them.

If we're being snarky! ;)

-8Lumifer
0Nornagest
I can't speak for everyone, but the main thing I've taken away from my jury service has been an overwhelming sense of contempt for the participants. It starts with the scheduling, continues into the selection process and compensation, and even filters down into that distinctive courthouse smell of dust and wood varnish and body odor; in sum, though, we're talking an impression that you're needed to fulfill a formal requirement, but aren't actually valued and in fact constitute a major inconvenience that must be worked around. Especially if you demonstrate any initiative, or indeed any traits at all other than having a pulse and a sponge-like capacity for rhetoric. I suppose there's an argument to be made for doing it anyway, but I've never been one for martyrdom.
-1Aussiekas
Wow, note to self, never reply to comments not directly relating to the idea or adding to the conversation or seek to argue definitions. Will this get me negative karma too? I stand by my reply. If you refuse a jury then you also refuse to participate in your democracy out of individually selfish motives. Is that a wrong analysis to think the person who comes up with some excuse is doing so to benefit themselves and that the knock on effects of that are a negative indicator for democracy? Tapping out.
Aussiekas-10

Alas a copy and paste job. And while fonts do matter, I am not in the camp of people who care. In the future I'll try to remember to use the site specific font. I hardly ever notice fonts at all unless they are horribly unintelligible like cursive writing or custom fonts for advertisements.

Aussiekas-10

I am fully aware of how things happen in the real world. I know of the corruption and loopholes and work arounds which have been established to degrade democracy and to address issues some 300 year old document could never have predicted.

I would negate their power to do more than continue to propose legislation. There would be no standing law making committee to write laws. They would have a very short turn around time and measures could be taken to prevent special access from being created. The SC's have no reason to listen to the Chamber of Commerce.... (read more)

0ChristianKl
International concerns usually do require treaties and treaties are laws. Do you want that the state doesn't engage in any international treaties?
0ChristianKl
You basically want to remove anyone competent enough to think a few years about an issue and develop reasonable strategies to deal with it to be removed from the system. Even if I would agree with the goal you won't achieve it. Again naive. You don't need to pay politicians money that they listen to experts who spend a lot of time thinking about a specific issue in detail. Listening to experts who study a given subjects for years is what any reasonable person does. That doesn't automatically means that one does everything that one hears but the ability to actually spend a lot of time to build experience in a subject usually helps when it comes to explaining how to do things. If you are a bunch of 10 random citizen and 10 people with PhD's in medicine and you want to overhaul the medical system it makes very much sense to listen to the various stakeholders and their perspective of how a proposed law might effect them. If you design a system to avoid letting stakeholders speak with the law makers you are going to end up with laws that do things that the people who wrote the law didn't foresee.
0ChristianKl
Then you wouldn't say silly things like: "It is insane that we allow the same people who are elected to cast their eye on society to identify problems, write up the solutions to those problems, and then also vote to approve those solutions." Of course congressman can do those things but the aren't the only ones. Alternatively you could also think you are arguing with fools which is no good assumption to make when you are on LW.

Abbreviations shorten the text, many posts on LW use them.

I have thought out the political implications and my desire was to design a system which has less of a place for politics. The void for politics to fill in how we conduct ourselves could be reduced intentionally.

The top level of government reads the bill and the call for a bill. If it doesn't match up with the focus of the call, then they can vote it down. Alternately the mid level issue committee could serve as a buffer to read proposed legislation before voting in a simple majority to pass it u... (read more)

0ChristianKl
Nuclear weapons are protected by air gaps. They have physical guards that are military personal that we trust for protecting the weapons. It's okay when the military has the power to use nuclear weapons. On the other hand you don't want to give the military the power to dictate election results. The fact that you use nuclear launch codes as example is also very ironic. At the beginning congress wanted nuclear launch codes to protect nuclear weapons. The US military didn't like their weapons to be crippled so they simply set all nuclear weapons to have the same code that all the personal knew. It's security theater. There also a nuclear weapon that nearly exploded when 3 of 4 safety measures failed and an airplane crashed. Nuclear launch codes didn't provide any safety in that case.
0ChristianKl
The NSA effectively control the cyberspace of the US and therefore can make your electronic election to have any result it wants to. The Chaos Computer Club and associated people have fought voting machine for quite some time now because they effectively mean that powerful people can easily rig elections.
0ChristianKl
You are basically saying that an dictatorship where the dictator chooses his advisors to write policies is the same system as a system where advisors are picked in some random fashion.
3ChristianKl
Then you haven't thought your proposal through. How many pages of laws do you think can a "regular citizen" read and understand per day? Especially if the people writing the laws have an incentive to not make it obvious what their law does and sometimes hide it issues in obscure paragraphs because they aren't the people voting on the law? Do you think that your system will only pass that many pages of law? You still fail to describe a process which makes the decision about who's allowed and who isn't and who is in power of controlling the process. If you write an IQ test you can write it in a way that women score a bit more or a bit less. You probably can also write it in a way that people with a high degree of openness to experience score better.

Indeed, probably too much in my own head. This was a first attempt at explaining a system I understood and not enough consideration was given.

I could have put those notes at the bottom as post scripts once someone had a half decent understanding of the system. Indeed, I stuffed up between random and regular citizen, they are about the same thing in my mind, as they don't need to have any qualification.

It was a lengthy step I skipped to describe how they were chosen. Basically a person needs to be within the normal range for intelligence to be an Regular... (read more)

0ChristianKl
Who has the power to evaluate the request and make the decision whether something is a hardship?
1ChristianKl
Many leaders of industry don't have PhD's. What's the process which you want to use to select them? Why shouldn't a clever politics professor simply hand out 1,000,000 PhD's to people who share similar politics as himself to get people into your expert commision?

Indeed, while I am into my own world of designing a system; I certainly never meant to imply the idea was original. Sortition was one of the original methods of expanding democracy to larger settlements, towns, and cities when direct democracy with full participation became infeasible due to there being too many people. It still has a place in many systems around the world from juries to grand juries which can indict people for crimes and investigate. For whatever reason it seems to have held on in the realm of justice more than in legislative or executive/military parts of government.

0asr
Juries have a lot of "professional supervision." In the Common Law system, the judge restricts who can serve on the jury, determines the relevant law, tells the jury what specific question of fact they are deciding, controls the evidence shown to the jury, does the sentencing, and more. My impression is that the non-Common Law systems that use juries give them even less discretion. So when we have citizen-volunteers, we get good results only by very carefully hemming them in with professionals. You can't supervise the executive in the same way. By definition, the executive is the part of the government in control of the coercive apparatus. If the nominal executives aren't able to give orders to the military without the approval of some other body, then the nominal executives aren't really in charge; they're just constitutional decoration, like the modern British monarchy, or the Presidium of the USSR.

IAWYC, but...

I would posit that the original conversation's discussion was too shallow. There is an opportunity cost in analysing or delving into every conversation to an extreme depth to root out the exact definition nodes or evidence being questioned to the point of resolving it. With shorter conversations of more implied meaning and less explicit meaning, there is a tendency for both sides to walk away feeling triumphant. Also there is a thread where any negative point 'scored' against and argument somehow invalidates the entire point.

I'd argue ov... (read more)

Indeed, I felt this point had already been covered/established; that MBA's are for business in practice and that they are increasingly less valuable as the supply has exploded while the quality of them has degraded. I was expanding the conversation to include a point about their utility being further reduced by the issuing authority also not placing a high value on their own degrees. Then I speculated on why the universities would do this and I posited a financial incentive, particularly in all these new programs in non-ivy league and non-endowment based... (read more)

Ok, my utility is probably low considering this open thread closes in 3 days :(

Anyhow, I had a thought when reading the Beautiful Probabilities in the Sequences. http://lesswrong.com/lw/mt/beautiful_probability/

It is a bit beyond my access and resources, but I'd love to see a graph/chart showing the percentage of scientific studies which become invalid or the percent which remain valid as we reduce the p <0.05.

So it would start with 100% of journal articles (take a sampling from the top 3 journals across various disciplines then break them down betwee... (read more)

What wasn't mentioned here, but in passing so far, is the economic benefit to the university for running the programs. I have read about how these prestigious universities offering these coursework only masters degrees, of all types, do not even accept the degree as part of their PhD program. Say you went to Harvard and did a thesis based masters in business instead, then you'd be a shoe-in for the PhD program. But the coursework style Masters programs, including MBAs, are not useful for that purpose. This shows that the universities tacitly acknowledge... (read more)

5ChristianKl
Most people don't do an MBA to do academic work. There are a lot of skills that are quite useful in the business world that don't correspond to academic knowledge.
Aussiekas130

I think the majority of responses I've seen here portray an anthropomorphic AGI. In terms of a slow or fast takeover of society, why would the AGI think in human terms of time? It might wait around for 50 years until the technology it wants becomes available. It could even actively participate in developing that technology. It could be either hidden or partially hidden while it works with multiple scientists and engineers around the world. Pretending to be or acting as a FAI until it can just snap and take over when it has what it wants to free itself... (read more)