From: Joao Pedro (jpnitya@mail.esoterica.pt)
Date: Sat Sep 13 1997 - 02:34:28 MDT
Hi!
Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Eric Watt Forste <arkuat@pigdog.org> writes:
>
> > Anders Sandberg writes:
> > > True. This is the major reason I don't think market solutions
> > > always produce the best results as perceived by human individuals;
> > > markets can organise to produce good results for other entities
> > > than humans, such as corporations.
> >
> > Yes, this is true, but the only alternative usually presented
> > to market solutions is political solutions, which have the
> > exact same failings: political systems can organise to produce
> > good results for other entities than humans, such as
> > governments.
>
> Good point. I have been looking at the Swedish political arena
> for some time, and it is very clear that it is not intended for
> the benefits of humans, just a group of organizations. After all,
> we do not elect individual politicians, just their parties,
> and through memetic selection organizations which make the
> fitness lansdcape nicer for organizations will prosper. There
> are some interesting cases of co-evolution and symbiosis
> (I suppose one could call it conspiracy, but I prefer a biological
> formalism) which leads to the formation of stable structures
> with very little interest in individual humans. Of course,
> many humans adapt to this to get maximal benefit from the present
> structures, creating career politicians, bureaucrats and wellfare-
> addicts.
I had the rather stupid meme that politicians on Nordic countries were
better than in the other countries. You are very wealthy, have rather
small countries (compared to the other wealthy countries in the world)
and seem to support your leaders more than in other countries such as
the US. Perhaps the majority of the people are manipulated by
corporations and politicians just as in every other country and the
people with whom I've talked to and the things I read are related to
this persons. Still with the level of education you have, you are bound
to be, on average, more intelligent and less susceptible to this
manipulations. What do you think of it?
> All in all, it seems that our problem is that we have metaorganisms
> around that doesn't help, and often hinder, transhuman progress.
> The big question is how to deal with this, and what kinds of interactions
> (and ethics) we should develop between individuals and metaorganisms.
IMHO, the key is to educate the people, to develop, to make the people
more intelligent (probably by genetic engineering as well) so that they
can't be as easy manipulated.
Governmental changes might also be a good idea, to allow some people to
have more votes than others (because of their higher education and/or
achievements in professional life), to give more power to local
government and create a system where people actually meet their
representatives, you know, the usual governmental reforms that everyone
talks about.
I'll have to study a bit more of economy to fully develop an opinion
about this matter.
--
Hasta la vista...
"Life's too short to cry, long enough to try." - Kai Hansen
Visit my site at: http://mithlond.esoterica.pt/~jpnitya/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:52 MST