From: Chen Yixiong, Eric (cyixiong@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Jan 06 2002 - 03:29:27 MST
> Two suggestions. First, insisting that freedom and responsability are
> something nice to have on an individual basis strikes me as not the
> right course (it may be the course taken by Ayn Rand's novels, but I
> haven't read them so I don't know).
I suggest encouraging critical thinking instead of just stuffing memes into these people's heads. From what I had seen in
educational systems, it seems like they greatly prefer the "meme stuffer" method which they obessively test with endless
examinations.
> It so happens that this only
> appeals to very few people (the ones with high self-confidence), which
> is probably the reason why libertarian ideas are still so marginally
> accepted. But when people realize that personal freedom and
> responsability must be protected for the society to flourish and solve
> its problems, then, if the argument is convincing, it should appeal to
> everyone.
In Singapore, the people here do not generally believe in Libertarian thinking. Many people do not believe that anacho-capitalist
societies can work. The assumptions that Libertarians make seems just too fantastic for them.
The largest barrier to considering such issues seriously seems to lie with the lack of critical thinking skills of many people here.
We should work on this. However, I suspect that many governments would not like such thinking skills.
> The other suggestion is that much of it should be modelable into a
> computer simulation. Doing the modeling, then showing what happens
> when you add a law, etc., should be enlightening. (One obvious
> difficulty is that one of the main virtue of freedom is invention
> brought by diversity, and invention doesn't seem very easy to model ;
> but you could use genetical algorithms on a specific solution space for
> that.)
I suspect that at best, such a model would only give an overly simplified picture of the situation. At worse, it could give a very
misleading one. Human societies have too much complexity that modelling them accurately would require an insane amount of
computations that perhaps only transhuman intelligences can undertake for human societies.
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