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Comment by snitko | Hacker News Reader

From reading your post I feel like there's this thinking that's ingrained very deep in you, which is that no matter how corrupt or awful the system is, you think the solution is more government and more control... layers of control. Could you for a moment just forget about it all and think, really imagine, what a world would look without governments? But don't imagine chaotic endless tribal wars. Imagine it to be a good place. It's a good exercise: no matter your political views, just imagine a world where there are no governments and just private businesses. Make it work. Think about details. How would you make it work if you knew there is no way you can create a government?

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I like to think I don't have political views, just observing faults of existing structures and finding bug fixes. I'm neither left or right or peachpie. Maybe you would call me a realist and I'm sure there's a way to put me in a box for that view, though it's important to stress that I don't subscribe to any particular political system. Humans are just too hard to manage that none of those black/white ideologies work.

Having zero governing bodies is a thought experiment laid out more than a few times in Sci-Fi, so assuming those weren't totally wrong, I don't think the human race can do without. The problem are humans and their motivations. Greed is one problem, laziness another. I don't know how to solve those. How do you make sure people do not exploit their freedom by making others suffer?

Okay, let's say there's no governing body. Now, there's a dispute. How is it resolved? Fight to death? The achievement of modern society is that we do not kill each other, and that requires rule makers, rule enforcers, oversight to keep chaos down to a minimum. If we do, it's a punishable offense. But punishment as implemented right now is totally wrong and doesn't solve anything. Putting people away for years does not make the crime undone and also doesn't turn a killer into a pet store owner. There are experiments with different kinds of containment and reintegration into society but this is also a hard problem that's unsolved.

I honestly don't know how without some sort of management entity a peer to peer society would work without rules of any kind.

Once you enact rules of conduct, you have everyone follow the rules, and something somewhere needs to make sure rules are not broken unjustifiably.

It's like distributed systems or cooperative threading, if you think about it.

Can you tell me how you'd do it?

> Okay, let's say there's no governing body. Now, there's a dispute. How is it resolved? Fight to death?

You've got an excellent question and I've got an excellent answer for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o It's a short video, but I highly recommend it to you (skip the first minute or so for a short historical intro). Please come back here and let me know if it answered your question. I also hope it doesn't just answer your question, but sets in your in a different mode for thinking, mode in which problems that seemed unsolvable can now be solved.

Watched it and as I guessed you will again have, like in a distributed system, some management facility. Friedman call it a judge or arbitrator and everyone can have their own, where judges will work out contracts between themselves for disputes of their own.

So, this all sounds like P2P with an evolutionary system of contracts between all kinds of parties, where there's no universal rule book (aka what we know as a country's laws).

If this really works, good, but how do you solve that humans will see that the contract between two other parties is better and will want the same deal? Will you give it to them?

I'd really like to think this is workable as it would give custom-fit "laws" for everybody. Though, there still needs to be some kind of general laws for heinous crimes, doesn't it?

> If this really works, good, but how do you solve that humans will see that the contract between two other parties is better and will want the same deal? Will you give it to them?

Not sure I understand the question. Who is giving whom the contract? The idea is, if you don't like the laws your protection agency / law firm provides you with, you switch firms. And that way you have a lot more control under which set of laws you want to live.

Once another party is involved you end up coming up with another agreement and first you need to agree which arbiter is used. You have more choice but where's body that makes sure everybody chooses the better judge so that bad judges get nothing to rule?

You sign up for a law firm and trust it with its choice of arbiters. Much like when you buy a cake, you trust the baker with ingredients and recipes. If you later feel sick, you never go to that bakery again and trash its reputation.

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