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Comment by throwaway14356 | Hacker News Reader

my theory is that we have to keep repeating this until a stable formula is found. It probably wont be any good but i think given enough time it will happen.

if we excessively simplify the problem is people acting in their own interest rather than that of the system. If you want to build something you do have to put building it first or else you are just dishonest.

imho if you want results you have to exclude people who are unwilling or unable to constructive contribute. The system must be such that those who expect others to organize everything don't become victims. perhaps just ask them if the thing is working with some kind of punishment and rollback logic.

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> exclude people who are unwilling or unable to constructive contribute

Exclusion comes with the brutal side-effect that the excluded people become ignorant towards and alienated from their own kind and thus accept any cost of punishment and negative consequences, including their own suffering! It's crazy. This then becomes the base and nourishment for extremists and their marketing strategies.

the problem is that the form of government doesn't really matter. if a lot of people are corrupt and greedy or selfish then even the most well meaning forms of government will fail. but if all people including the leaders are doing their best to be good and supportive of each other then even a dictatorship will be beneficial to everyone.

so instead of focusing on the form of government, what we really need to focus on is to educate everyone to become better people.

i made a similar argument before in response to an article by peter kropotkin titled "are we good enough?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644561

Seems a noble plan but you will always have some good and some bad players.

The form does matter as you can set things in stone to safeguard and make it impossible for future generations to rule themselves.

I think we can pay people to study election programs and pay for getting an (otherwise unimportant) diploma.

We are currently some place at 0% of the voters knowing more than 0.1% of the programs.

Much progress to be made for very little money.

we will certainly never eliminate all bad players, but i think we can make them into a minority that doesn't have much influence.

what would make it impossible for future generations to rule themselves?

form of government matters in as much as it empowers the people and doesn't enable bad players. form doesn't matter if and only if we were to be able to eliminate all bad players.

the point is that reducing bad players is more important than the perfect form of government, but practically, once we have reduced bad players to a minority, we can tweak the form of government to render the remaining bad players powerless.

in the end that probably means that some form of democracy that allows people to remove bad players from positions of power is probably going to achieve the best outcome.

none of the current systems, including all western democracies, allow the removal of bad players in part because there are just to many of them.

It struck me once that the elections every 4 years was pretty ambitious for that time. Today the delay doesn't seem required. Have people change their vote when they like with a min max to take and leave office.

The greeks had ostracism the winner got 10 year banishment. That too we could do in real time.

It doesn't just seem nice or interesting. We have enough evidence to see the current formula is dangerous. Are we at 200 million deaths already?

I would also like to see politicians make draft laws and projects that citizens can vote for and against. Let them explain their ideas with nice docu style visuals.

Say one set per week with 2 months to vote.

If the internet is useless for secure elections we can make a new network with new hardware.

I just read about the kleroterion, seems a hilarious approach.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion

If you didn't already listen/watch/read to some professor Guy Standing. It is at least inspiring

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