From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Sep 06 1999 - 11:13:48 MDT
"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> Ok, well that's fine then. A little competition in providing "government"
> services (protection, law, meat inspection) would be a very interesting.
> But I think we may get back into the "too much information" problem.
> Are you qualified to judge whether U.S.D.A meat inspectors are
> better or worse than Elmer & Mo's Clean Meat Verification Services, Inc.?
> What about comparing in detail two legal systems such as the U.S.
> system and the French system?
>
> While the idea is attractive, I think the problem is that the devil
> is in the details.
No, the problem is that we don't have collaborative filtering. CF is
the ideal solution for this; it acts as an attention-amplifier that lets
you pay indirect attention to corporate ethics every time you select a
brand of laundry detergent. Working CF is fundamentally necessary to
any pragmatic attempt to create a truly libertarian market, because
otherwise the difficulty of paying attention will create demands for
government regulation to ensure environmental responsibility, product
safety... The libertarian response of "So don't buy unethical or unsafe
products" is fine in theory. In practice, it works to the exact degree
a consumer knows what ve's buying.
Obviously, CF is also important to maintaining a representative democracy.
Go CFers!
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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