Mike wrote:
> Subjectivity only exists as a consequence of each individual conducting analysis
> with incomplete facts, and purposely excluding commonly obvious facts that
> conflict with one's prejudices, while rationalizing that denial. Both are errors
> of logic.
Nicely and succinctly put. In my mind, the basics are these: socialism is unlikely to work in the long term because its primary means is force. Assuming that some intelligent people, when forced, do things that they would not otherwise do, it follows that a socialist government sometimes forces intelligent people to behave unintelligently. Assuming intelligence is better than stupidity, the more people who are forced to behave unintelligently means more people doing stupid things. That stupidity is undesirable is a personal a priori.
However, and this *may* be something that occurred to Einstein, the weakness of this line of thought is that some people aren't that intelligent. In fact nearly all people aren't geniuses. Einstein may have been hoping that the intelligence of a rule-making body might be greater than the combined intelligence of most people. Today, we can see that modern democracies don't seem to be attracting the best and the brightest to government (how many politicians do we have here? ;), but it remains to be seen whether government is dumber than most people.
Anyway, regardless, it's a stupid idea to force intelligent people to do unintelligent things. All intelligent people should be free. But it is also the case that unintelligent people can be forced to do intelligent things. I'm sorry, but until we have some foolproof method of deciding who's who, it's better to let them all do what they want, with the hope that intelligent people can figure out how to reach a Singularity quickly, so we all can be intelligent.
A rub:
Who am I talking about when I say 'intelligent people'? Few people are intelligent enough to ignore their memetic script entirely and reason from first principles, and hardly anyone (no one?) is intelligent enough to ignore their genetic script entirely. This may be one of the commonly obvious facts that Mike was talking about. An hypothesis: all incorrect facts are either genetic or memetic, often both, but never neither. If 'intelligence' can be defined (for the moment) as one's actual or potential ability to know what is the case, then anyone suffering from genetic or memetic imperatives (which deflect them from actual or potential knowledge of what is the case) is unintelligent to some degree. This arguably includes every last bit of pink goo.
The most unintelligent reality (assuming human life) occurs where no one can ignore their memetic or genetic script at all. Here we are guaranteed, assuming that some of the facts known are incorrect, to be unable to assess what is the case. In this situation, there is no possibility of anyone changing their mind about anything, even if the apparent idea is perfectly true. I know that I have changed my mind on a few things in my lifetime, so this is not the world we live in.
The most intelligent reality occurs where everyone can ignore their genetic or memetic script as necessary or desired. In this case we would expect a convergence over time toward agreement on what is the case, maybe even quickly. The advent of AI/neurohacks will surely speed this up as the ratio of augments to gaussians increases. But today, this may or may not be happening, so unlike Liebniz I will not suggest this is the best of all possible worlds.