From: Chen Yixiong, Eric (cyixiong@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Aug 06 2001 - 02:01:57 MDT
From: Re: [sociologistics] Status Update: Game Theory
<< As I have pointed out before, societies are generally not designed. Where there are designs prepared for a society, societies have, in every single case I can think of, deviated substantially from the design. The primary reason is that societies are made up of people who have plans and designs of their own which are more important to them than that of the designer. And don't assume the designer is right. History tends to show that the opposite has more often been the case. >>
This merely means the design does not fit the people, it has insufficient usefulness and it cannot take into or at least allow for contingencies that cause the deviations. Of course, it could also mean that we cannot compute a design that fits all members of a society because they do not think and behave rationally and thus, thanks to Godel's Incompleteness Theorm, we cannot have a consistent set of systems that fits everyone. Thus members' behaviours start to display inconsistency, and a system that works for all these people may behave inconsistently too.
While this may seem to declare all attempts of intelligent design of social systems as impossible, I find that if a society only accepts rational people, then it could function rationally. While fully rational people do not exist and would seem undisirable (because due to the Incompleteness Theorm, they can easily stumble over paradoxes like "This is untrue"), we can have people sufficiently rational such that their sum of irrationality remains below a critical point that causes chaotic effects to occur in societies and thus for the entire system to spin out of control. The states of matter (i.e. solid, liquid, gaseous, plasma) shows an example of this clearly. This forms the breakthrough and the entire foundation of the Theory of Sociologistics.
For those of you who think I wanted to emulate the Borg collective, I must protest this unneccessary jumping to conclusions. I intend the system to rely on the certain sets of principles (subject to further revisions) that would increase efficiency and effectiveness [E&E] (or rights and justice, if you want to add in such highly abstract terms), for instance:
1) In the concept of Intellicracy: Competitiveness in thought, and Cooperativeness in action.
Simplified Layman Terms (SLT): "We each all put our ideas without bothering who proposed them. Then, we choose the best idea and all of us work together on it."
2) In the concept of Intellicracy: All of us have the equal right and *obligation* to publish and share information freely. While we consider all information, we recognise that different ideas cannot have equal E&E. Hence, we must choose only the best, unconstrained by irrelevant factors.
SLT: "No secrets should exist, for everyone must declare everything. We will take the best idea even if we absolutely hate the person who propose this."
3) In the Legal System's "Freedom of Action Principle": We respect the choices of people and ask them to respect ours if we want to live together. Bearing in mind that different people may have totally different value systems, we can allow those who infringe our value systems to leave freely, but they may never return. Those who stay must comply.
SLT: "If you do something wrong, you correct it and compensate those who had suffered due to your mistake. If you do not, you can leave. However, if you choose to leave, you may never return."
If you continue reading further, you will find that the ideal form of these concepts do away with centralised governments acting seperately from people. In fact, for these principles to retain validity and due to the complexities of implementing any form of such "conventional" governments, the people have to rule themselves.
[More info at http://sociologistics.webhop.org]
Whether past attempts of setting up colonies had failed have little relevance to a new attempt that uses radically different ideas and technology. Even if you only observe black cats for the rest of your life, you cannot prove that white cats don't exist. You can only say that you saw only black cats, and the more distinct white cats you see, the higher you can set your confidence level and the probability that all cats always have black coats. Similiarly, you may just witness a working, designed colony from this or the next few attempts.
<< You and I have discussed these issues a lot without seeming to reach any mutual conclusions. The book "Law's Order" by David Friedman which I am now reading has some new thinking on this very subject. I have found it very interesting. I think you would too. At the very least it is likely to change the terms of the discussion between us on topics like this one. >>
I had downloaded the draft version of the book from http://www.best.com/~ddfr/laws_order/index.shtml and will read it soon. I had read another book by the same author entitled "Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life". I do like the author's style and the concepts expounded, however, I find that the book relies on an incomplete theory.
An incomplete theory does not mean an invalid theory, but a theory that had left out some important factors and would thus distort reality. For instance, the theory that Earth had a flat topology would suffice for making small local maps, but not world maps. For the issue of using our knowledge of economics to design a better economical system, looking *only* through the confines of our textbooks only seek to confine our minds and restrict us from arriving at a better solution.
Disclaimer: I don't claim to propose complete theories, but more complete ones. No theory can remain complete and consistent at the same time, so it remains for someone else to propose a better theory.
Actual economies, especially with governments intervening, do not always correspond to the concepts based in the textbooks. Highly volatile stock markets wreak havoc with the theory of market equilibriums, people behave in irrational manners such as by their purchasing of lottery tickets, our societies do not have free flow of information implicit in many economical theories, and people have an irritating tendency not to choose the best alternative but the best perceived one.
While the complexities involved here have such great magnitudes that certain people believe that we can never design an economy (and sometimes citing evolution and chaos theory), however, if we confine ourselves to discussing how to create and design a rational society, then we may actually succeed. Not all people can and will join, but this has no relevance because we logically cannot find ourselves worst off by *voluntarily* experimenting with a new concept in isolation since we can always fall back to the old system easily.
I must emphasize that I wish to rub my hands off solving social issues with irrational people. I suspect that no consistent solution will exist, and that even if we find one, it would apply to specific domains (i.e. incomplete). Perhaps such problems have no solution within human understanding at all. I pragmatically only want to deal with rational societies.
<< Keep in mind that government officials, police, judges, jailers, prosecutors and legislators and even the people who design societies are also just as liable to behave maliciously in order to benefit themselves. The tool with which you seek to solve the problem has the same problem. >>
I disagree. The economical system of the proposed project would have an entirely different structure. Of the many classes of economical systems, our current "capitalist" system has an orientation towards rewarding those who achieved the most. I hypothesize that the result of this orientation causes people to develop their greedy nature, even if originally nature predisposed these people in such a manner. Greed (and its opposite, fear), as shown in game theory, clearly depletes the common good for the individual good.
I hypothesise that *rational* people would prefer solutions that maximise the common good because we usually don't play one-off zero-sum games in real life and we can gain immense benefits over the long run from such behavior. To do this (or maximise it to above the chatic threshold), a few conditions must exist:
1) Perfect flow of information (with computer networks). From openness, comes trust.
2) Empowered people (by virtue of skills, abilities, knowledge, wisdom etc.) must exist.
Thus, I infer that, in a society of rational people with this conditions, then these people will have prefer to contribute to the common good rather than hoard resources to maximise their own utility. This has one following condition: That the economical system must *compensate* these people, not reward or punish them, so that the amount of resources they acquire and expend would eventually balance to zero. These people would also most rationally do something they like to do to instead of having to take a job they dislike and work on their "hobbies" after work hours.
The open source movement may support this hypothesis, for in spite of an economical system that does not reward those who contribute to the common good, some people do have the initiative to do so.
You also imply that the person who designs societies may have more power in that society, but this may not always apply (refer to Intellicracy) and even then, we may not have a person but the entire society designing itself (as I intend). Then, the founders would merely need to establish a set of "seed" principles that will allow such development and avoid any problems like power domination by having "checks and balances" (such as by full disclosure of all information and limiting of society membership). Meanwhile, the implication that societies will always have a dedicated police, judiciary and other components may or may not apply to an actual society of a different design to those existing today.
I must also debunk the incomplete theory that evolution would always produce the best solutions. We can see that the design of our eyes, with its blind spot, had to do with a less than optimal design by nature. We can also see that the QWERTY computer keyboard we use now, that had resulted from "free" competition, actually *slows* down our typing speed.
Sometimes, we need intelligent design to get from a good solution to an excellent one. The status quo knowledge may sound nice and comforting, but if one wishes to transcend it to find a better solution, then one must look for new alternative solutions.
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