Re:extropians, what about democracy ?

From: nano-brain (OooJeffbaureooo@aol.com)
Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 07:58:01 MDT


> The market should be seen to include the entire world of human and
non-human
> action. Marketplaces may be seen

as fundamentally democratic in that each action is given a causal vote in
determining the future state of the world.

some people claim that ideas & cultural moves obey to evolutionary processes
similar to those of the biological realms - memes float around us. Some
researchers explain & model the propagation of religious ideas as kinda
*viral* memes. Other claim it is also the case for financial markets
dynamics
and some authors combine the two ideas proposing free-markets for ideas &
futurology (R. Hanson). see: www.ideosphere.com

a free market incubating ideas, concepts or anticipations (testable bets on
future) is a very nice idea to me. After a time, look inside, in the boiling
pothole, if you are a good cooker, there are many new ideal compounds, new
visions in there. With free markets, you can even know how much you can
trust
these new things which is important for decision. So i buy.

> Political democracy may also be seen as a part of the market - where
> the forces of elections, popular opinion, natural disasters, economics,
> international relations, education and everything else are in some manner

weighted and used to come to a decision. Economists have long acknowledged
the fact that markets are 'imperfect' due primarily to a lack of perfect
information.

what really stunned me with this notion of CMM & collaborative work/decision
was the fact that the global solution to the problem could be achieved
though actors had only very limited knowledge or information (about the
whole complexity of the problem: limited vision of the CMM and about others'
preferences). Another interesting part is that diversity (including
diversity
in global performance over the CMM) is highly desirable for adaptation. And
if agents are not fully rational or logical ?
http://www.ethics.ubc.ca/pad/papers/irrational.pdf

> A voter also has many unanswered questions. We constantly act in this
state
> of imperfect knowledge (who knows every aspect of any decision?) and it
can
> be seen to decrease efficiency in any market it occurs in.

Yes, considering the work to do & the amount of information to handle, even
the best of us won't make the job. Alone at least. Maybe there are some
heuristics that allows legion of imperfect agents to produce perfect
decisions
(given available information) ? Financial markets are also driven by actors
who cannot handle the *whole picture*: they specialize & reduce their scope
(division of labor).

>The market has a desire to move toward a state of perfect information
>and unless all market participants have access to the information in one
>another's heads this condition of perfection will be unfulfilled.)

I don't know if the market tends toward a state of perfect information. All
i can see is that it creates large wealth unequalities, and those logically
stems from uneven (unfair ?) distribution of information between agents. It
does not seem to equalize with time, by far.

> Collaborative filtering, cell phone internet messaging and American Idol
> style voting will all find themselves participants in the political
> system. The more quickly they are integrated, the more people are educated
> (at a

proficiency and college) the higher the probability that transhuman memes
will become widely popularized and implemented. How can we on this board
move forward and make these dreams not only real but happen in a way that
will be morally acceptable?

Maybe a simple, demonstrative & usefull experiment of collective
intelligence
& creativity could help to reinforce all associated memes. Then, the will
to experiment it further or to implement it really ! I would like to know
if this has already been done or figured out in a way, or what are the most
promising angles of attack for collaborative thinking. What is the maturity
of
existing heuristic & how far is direct experimentation ? People at the Santa
Fe Institute & Los Alamos Lab. are involved in this kind of reflexion with
their symbiotic intelligence project but i don't know its current status.

Maybe some of you have ideas ?

>If the ideas here are so powerful and correct then simply airing them
>honestly will result in the world choosing this course - the course that
>they see as most beneficial. In this sense democracy is the best route to
a
>transhuman future.

that's what i thought.

thanks for sharing your views.

jeff

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