From extropians-request@extropy.org Thu Dec 1 09:52:04 1994 Return-Path: extropians-request@extropy.org Received: from usc.edu (usc.edu [128.125.253.136]) by chaph.usc.edu (8.6.8.1/8.6.4) with SMTP id JAA06749 for ; Thu, 1 Dec 1994 09:52:02 -0800 Received: from news.panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA24084; Thu, 1 Dec 94 09:46:40 PST Received: (from exi@localhost) by news.panix.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) id MAA14753; Thu, 1 Dec 1994 12:02:58 -0500 Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 12:02:58 -0500 Message-Id: <199412011702.MAA14753@news.panix.com> To: Extropians@extropy.org From: Extropians@extropy.org Subject: Extropians Digest #94-12-7 - #94-12-16 X-Extropian-Date: December 1, 374 P.N.O. [12:01:20 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org X-Mailer: MailWeir 1.0 Status: RO Extropians Digest Thu, 1 Dec 94 Volume 94 : Issue 334 Today's Topics: BASICS: 'Nother Quigley Quote [1 msgs] BASICS: Anarchy != Chaos [1 msgs] BASICS: Contra Standing Armies [1 msgs] BASICS: The Machinery of Friedman [1 msgs] Green Goo [1 msgs] singularity [1 msgs] Singularity: millenarian superstition [1 msgs] Social Security [1 msgs] The Machinery of Friedman [1 msgs] WWW: Terminology [1 msgs] Administrivia: Note: I have increased the frequency of the digests to four times a day. The digests used to be processed at 5am and 5pm, but this was too infrequent for the current bandwidth. Now digests are sent every six hours: Midnight, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. If you experience delays in getting digests, try setting your digest size smaller such as 20k. You can do this by addressing a message to extropians@extropy.org with the body of the message as ::digest size 20 -Ray Approximate Size: 32085 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: sameer Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 00:39:36 -0800 (PST) Subject: [#94-12-7] BASICS: 'Nother Quigley Quote > Similar arguments apply to larger, more organized bands of killers. like the government -- sameer Voice: 510-841-2014 Network Administrator Pager: 510-321-1014 Community ConneXion: The NEXUS-Berkeley Dialin: 510-549-1383 http://www.c2.org (or login as "guest") sameer@c2.org ------------------------------ From: fhapgood@world.std.com (Fred Hapgood) Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 16:12:09 -0500 Subject: [#94-12-8] The Machinery of Friedman I kept seeing references to Dave Friedman's book _Machinery of Freedom_ here, so I went and got it. I'm not sure I have this private court thing of his figured out. Let's say I want to live in a society that prohibits child abuse and am willing to pay for my preferences. How do I do that under Friedman's scheme? I assume that me and everybody who feels the way I do -- and there are a lot of us -- hires private investigators to go around checking up on parental behavior and then snatching kids away from parents who are discovered trying to burn them or whatever. Their agents would not get in the way much, since there are so many more of us. (I would assume, since I would be employing these people, that I would have the right of every employer to tell them what neighborhoods and families to concentrate their attention on. I guess that goes without saying.) This raises a theoretical point, which is that Friedman everywhere in this book defines government as 'a system of legal coercion', and seems to want his book to be about building alternatives to such systems. But the defining feature of the justice system, civil or criminal, is that it can compel conformance with its judgements. This is what distinguishes it from talking things over over a beer. If my PIs are empowered to grab your kids (because you are selling their bodies to support your drug habit, or refusing to provide them with adequate health care, or letting them run around the streets without educating them) then they are empowered to act against your interests and without your consent. This looks like a system of legal coercion to me. As I say, this is just a philosophical point. Finally, I don't think for an instant that a system like this would lead to a plurality of legal codes. The law is a social operating system, except that the rewards for standardization and intercompatability are a lot higher in social dynamics than in computation. (Think how much easier it is to organize consortia under a common legal environment.) I'm sure that if we had Friedman's system one legal code would take over the globe in no time at all. Probably be run by Microsoft. Why not? I don't mean this critically; maybe Bill would do a great job as sheriff of the world. ------------------------------ From: nancy@genie.slhs.udel.edu Date: Thu, 1 Dec 94 11:28:16 GMT Subject: [#94-12-9] Green Goo "T. David Burns" wrote: > >At 9:53 AM 11/30/94, Anders Sandberg wrote (Quoting Nancy): >>>Also, as far as I can tell, nothing but governments really indulge in >>>efforts to kill huge numbers of people. Terrorists only seem to want >>>to kill smallish numbers for publicity. >> >>Yes, most terrorists seem to like dramatic, very local attacks. > >Terrorists usually use terror in an effort to influence others. In the >green goo case, the act of terror would be intrisically motivated. For a >certain class of person, radical reduction of human population is a goal in >itself. Why influence a government to do something if you have the means to >accomplish it directly yourself? Excuse me--I left out a part of my line of thought. It looks to me as though it takes being in a government to get people to commit murder on a large scale. While this is an observation rather than a proof, the pattern's conspicuous enough to be worth noting. Nancy Lebovitz ------------------------------ From: timstarr@netcom.com (Tim Starr) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 03:43:00 -0800 Subject: [#94-12-10] BASICS: Contra Standing Armies >From: freeman@netcom.com (Jay Reynolds Freeman) >Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 00:58:50 -0800 >Subject: [#94-11-516] BASICS: Anarchy is not Chaos > >...An occasional problem with defense by force of arms is the need to >maintain enough firepower to cope with the largest coalition that can >ever to take arms against you. Sounds like it would save us all lots >of money if we got together and backed a police force that disbanded, >disarmed and dispersed such coalitions, as they formed. Said police >force would of course have to take action against any such coalition, >even if the coalition's members had not agreed to the police force in >the first place. And it would save still more money if we directed >the police force, even in the absence of coalitions, to confiscate all >weapons more powerful than, say, spitballs, again necessarily without >regard for their owners' wishes. What's to keep this standing army from confiscating more money than it would be supposed to save? Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Think Universally, Act Selfishly Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Liberty is the Best Policy - timstarr@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: Anders Sandberg Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 12:29:50 +0100 (MET) Subject: [#94-12-11] WWW: Terminology Someone complained about the lack of "List Memory" about common jargon. In order to ameliorate this, I would like to shamelessly advertise my WWW page with definitions of transhumanistic jargon and terms. It exists at: http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/Trans/words_page.html I would very much like comments, suggestions for improvement and new entries! For other web.weavers: All words have NAME tags, so feel free to link to them as footnotes or explanations in your own documents. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! nv91-asa@hemul.nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y ------------------------------ From: nancy@genie.slhs.udel.edu Date: Thu, 1 Dec 94 11:48:36 GMT Subject: [#94-12-12] singularity Jordan Sparks wrote: > >Lately, I've been questioning the possibility of a singularity happening >at all. I cannot see how there can be a sharp distinction between "now" >and "afterwards." If intelligence is increasing exponentially, then it >is not approaching an asymptote and should go on increasing forever. >Most of the world is already beyond the understanding of any individual. >As I see it, the world will simply be increasingly beyond our >understanding. The singularity smacks of the religious afterlife. Is >there someone out there who can explain to me why there should ever come >a moment when "all the rules change?" Vinge has described the Singularity as a fairly imminent time when things will have changed so much that we-as-we-are-now cannot understand them. He finds it a major challenge as a science fiction writer. He's written that, in retrospect, the Singularity may look like a reasonably smooth and comprehensible transition. Nancy Lebovitz ------------------------------ From: szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 04:32:35 -0800 (PST) Subject: [#94-12-13] Singularity: millenarian superstition Nancy Lebovitz: > Vinge has described the Singularity as a fairly imminent time when > things will have changed so much that we-as-we-are-now cannot > understand them. The trouble with this is that phenomena in the real world differ greatly in how far they can go before we lose our ability to understand or predict them. For example, we can predict the trajectory of Jupiter, with high precision, millions of years into the future, (modulo its potential dismantlement). We can't predict the weather much past next week. Some cultural structures (eg family structures, religions) have more persistence than others (eg TV series, fads, startup businesses). So, the concept of a single "Singularity" for history is ludicrously false to facts; it is superstition. Different aspects of history will become increasingly incomprehensible at different rates, and the world will never be completely incomprehensible to we-as-we-are-now. Nick Szabo szabo@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: Mark Grant Date: Thu, 1 Dec 94 11:39:41 GMT Subject: [#94-12-14] BASICS: The Machinery of Friedman -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- fhapgood@world.std.com (Fred Hapgood) said : > Let's say I want to live in a society that prohibits child abuse > and am willing to pay for my preferences. How do I do that under > Friedman's scheme? I suspect the answer is that you can't, though you could live in a society where *you* were prohibited from abusing children by your own choice. > I assume that me and everybody who feels the > way I do -- and there are a lot of us But how many are willing to pay extra for it, and how much ? This is one of the differences between a self-governing society and a democracy, if you want to coerce someone in the former then you have to pay for it.... > If my PIs are empowered to > grab your kids (because you are selling their bodies to support > your drug habit, or refusing to provide them with adequate health > care, or letting them run around the streets without educating > them) then they are empowered to act against your interests and > without your consent. How are they "empowered" ? Surely you're effectively just hiring a bunch of thugs to go around beating up people who don't agree with you ? While I don't neccesarily disagree with your doing that, any PI who grabbed my children in such a world would soon have a bullet in the head courtesy of 'Joe's Security and Pizza, Inc' (if the kid didn't get them first, of course - you're assuming that kids in such a society wouldn't be armed and trained to defend themselves, I'd certainly make sure that mine were). While that won't neccesarily stop them, it would certainly drive the price up, and is likely to result in PIs showing up on *your* doorstep to grab *your* kids to prevent you "abusing" them with your coercive ideas.... That might well escalate until your city was being faced with an ultimatum from 'Fred's Nuclear Mercenaries, PLC' to desist or be nuked. Do you consider your brand of morality important enough to die for ? > I'm sure that if we had > Friedman's system one legal code would take over the globe in no > time at all. Probably be run by Microsoft. But would it ? As someone once said, "the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from". Since you're comparing laws to operating systems it's worth remembering that there are plenty of operating systems out there that *aren't* written by Microsoft (e.g. NeXTSTEP, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, AUX, MacOS, Linux, DR-DOS, Minix, BSD386, Xenix, AmigaDOS, OSF/1, just to list a few off the top of my head). The number of users is relatively small compared to MS-DOS and Windows(tm), but many of them (myself included) have no intention of changing to any current Microsoft OS. I suspect that something similar would happen with competing legal systems, most people would join one of the major systems (the "MS-DOS" or "MacOS" of the legal world), and a smaller number would stick with their own system that suited them. Useful as a single legal standard is in many respects, it also has significant drawbacks which for many people would be worth the extra hassle of being part of a different system (e.g. how many people do you think would leave the current US legal system if a competitor appeared that was identical except for legalising self-medication ? I'd guess at least 25 %). It seems to me that in many respects current discussions of legal systems are going in the wrong direction. Many seem to be asking how we can maintain something like the current system in the future. What seems more important to me is to ask *what* sort of legal system you can maintain with the sorts of technologies that we're talking about, where anyone can, for example, print out a few AK-47s on their home 3D-Postscript printer, or send some nanobots off into the garden to hunt out a few kilos of U235 for their 'Kitchen Improvised Nuclear Weapons' course.... My guess is you either have to stick electrodes in everyone's brains to control them from a central source, or give up on coercion altogether. I don't see that there's really any third choice other than continual warfare. Mark P.S. Dunno whether this should go under "BASICS" or not.... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLt219WhZrcRdG1w1AQEESgP/VxoQYRyjK4XA5fiq08TPBafDRsHAoZXD 2OmAFcfYOhUZWG+3DhcSpEDjX2NDYJ6w1Aay9RkV14mANw1e+T7zHwQPWXMd0sKy +BCMUZ5JjH+JvV7tYibTpD1tjA9L1e9wdYsSPOyxVyndGYiYJUcOd6mgoJ+85aI+ SMjsdO4SrJk= =B6pY -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------ From: timstarr@netcom.com (Tim Starr) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 04:55:19 -0800 Subject: [#94-12-15] Social Security >From: chip@netcom.com (Chip Morningstar -- "Software Without Moving Parts") >Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 13:25:43 -0800 >Subject: [#94-11-534] Social Security (was: BASICS: Re: environment) > >Actually, one of the problems with the SS system is that those currently >receiving SS payments are getting back *substantially* more than the actuarial >value of what they put in. True, but that's not really the way the benefit they should've received ought to be calculated. Imagine instead what their return would have been if their input had been invested & earned the average rate of return of the stock market since SS was imported to the USA (about 11%, I'm told). Then they'd have been in line to get a whole lot more than they ever put in! Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Think Universally, Act Selfishly Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Liberty is the Best Policy - timstarr@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: timstarr@netcom.com (Tim Starr) Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 04:56:42 -0800 Subject: [#94-12-16] BASICS: Anarchy != Chaos >From: Phil Goetz > >We do have gangs, but notice that we don't have Viking raiding parties. We have raiding parties conducted by the standing armies of "law-enforce- ment" at all levels, from local police departments & sheriffs to state police & federal agencies like the IRS & BATF. One of these recently burned alive dozens of innocent men, women & children on live national TV, and not one of the perps at any link in the command chain has been prosecuted for their part in the crime. >...It sounds like the Dark Ages to me, when every big town had a watch, >every village hoped their local toughs would be stronger than raiding parties, >and being raped &/or murdered was a risk that was part of being a farmer >far outside the city walls. The status quo is one in which every big town as a standing army known as a "police force," which most people hope is stronger than marauding gangs of predatory criminals, and being raped &/or murdered is a risk that is part of life inside the boundaries of most cities. Le plus ca change, the le plus c'est la meme chose. >>>Forests are communal. >> >>False. While much forestland is held in common, much of it is also held >>privately. My extended family owns about a thousand acres of forestland. > >Your family is rich and lucky, then. >Congratulations on being a member of the ruling class. Hey, thanks! Can't wait to break the news to my folks! When do we find out what our Swiss bank acc't number with all our riches in it is? Seriously, my grandfather bought the land when it was dirt-cheap, because it was literally dirt at the time. It had just been clear-cut by loggers. He bought it & let the forest grow back. It ain't old-growth, but it's forest all right. Lucky we are; rich we ain't. Members of the ruling class? A bunch of dairy farmers? That's a good one. Ever thought of taking your show on the road :-)? >>>But the basic problem is the supposition that there is an absolute market >>>value, and that it is the "correct" value. >> >>Strawman. Your basic problem is that you think there is some superior way >>for people to express their preferences about the most valued uses of >>resources than market prices. > >I didn't say that. Market prices are probably the best way to express >preferences. But we decide which way we want market prices to lean, >and enact legislation accordingly. By "market," I intended to refer to capitalist acts between consenting adults, not ones mediated by the coercion of State legislation. >>What makes you think any sort of State is necessary to protect against >>negative externalities? > >A State can do so. States can only do so by imposing negative externalities of their own; how do you tell which is more costly, those of the market or those of the State? >...Propose an alternative and I'll listen. >Don't just say "privatize everything"; describe how you would dispose >of the State and its resources, including how to decide who gets what. > >It seems many people on this list assume that someone has worked out an >alternative to government, but never state their reasons for thinking so. >Is there an anarchy FAQ that I'm missing out on? These questions need book-length answers. Fortunately, several authors have attempted to provide some. Aside from the oft-mentioned classic "The Machinery of Freedom," by David Friedman, I'd also suggest Bruce Benson's "The Enterprise of Law" and "For a New Liberty," by Murray Rothbard. I'll be happy to discuss what you think of any of those, or to address the subject of any particular commons you're curious about how to privatize. >>>seems clear from his writing that he would like the whole world to be more >>>like Hong Kong, Taiwain, or Holland than like Pennsylvania. He reminds me >>>of a visitor from mainland China who asked me, "Why do you have all these >>>forests? Why don't you cut them down?" >> >>Why don't you stop trying to come up with bad words to put into other people's >>mouths for a change? Would it be that difficult to actually address what >>they actually do say? > >Reality check, Tim. That's what I was doing. >I didn't put words into anybody's mouth. You didn't? Then what were you doing when you were attributing the view that the world ought to have higher population density like those places you refer to above to Julian Simon? How is that anything other than putting words into Simon's mouth? >>>I don't think the Dark Ages should be taken as a model for an Extropian >>>society. >> >>What on earth makes you think anyone is proposing any such thing? > >I should have quoted the message it replied to. >Someone commented that there was no real government around AD 900, >and that people then first realized governments were nonessential. Right. That was the quote from Carroll Quigley, deceased history prof. of Georgetown University, that I posted because I found it interesting and thought others would, too. >Well, they're nonessential if you want to live in the Dark Ages. How are they essential if you want to live under presumably better circumstances? >We didn't used to have large governments. Correct. >Federal governments are a social meme which have taken over the modern >world because they outcompeted other social structures. This is a bit like saying that cancer takes over the body because it outcom- petes other cells. >...The introduction >of federal currency and a standing army were generally considered improvements >over what people had at the time. 1) False. Both were highly controversial at the time of their adoption, and were considered regressive by many. For example, Thomas Jefferson called standing armies "instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation, and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors, that those gover- nors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot..." (David N. Mayer, "The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson," University of Virgina, 1994, p. 156). Free Banking had been a central platform plank of the Jacksonian movement, and it took the Civil War for the Greenback advocates to get their way. 2) Even if those things had been generally considered improvements, that would hardly justify them. There was a time when the sun was generally thought to rotate around the earth, and that didn't make it right. >>>...I realize some of you are anarchists and think we should have >>>no government. Do you want a dog-eat-dog, red-in-tooth-and-claw jungle, >>>or do you think something will prevent people from killing, pillaging, >>>raping, etc.? >> >>The latter. > >What? How? I'm something of a cross between a Friedmanite & a classical republican when it comes to defense, myself. I'd go for a mutual defense association that would be a contemporary equivalent of the medeival Anglo-Saxon frithguild or the pre-Cromwellian Irish tuath. >(If you were really a Nietzschian, wouldn't you want the jungle?) Only if I got to be the lion :-). ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V94 #334 *********************************