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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The rational response to this point-counterpoint is to decentralise power & let people take their own risks as far as we are able for the truth is a rare and delicate flower which we cannot reliably identify. The only fair option is to let people make their own decisions.

But for some reason the level of abstract thought required to justify that is just too high and people can't overcome their instincts. It seems nearly every time there is a crisis the body politic centralises power and, usually, gets a much worse result than just letting people do what makes sense to them. Then people just assume that because they did something and the world didn't literally end in fire that they what they did helped. Then in the good times they do their level best to run down whatever reserves are available and prepare to go in to the next crisis with nothing but elbow grease and optimism.

Human nature: the biggest threat we face.

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I don’t entirely disagree, but I think you lean too far in seeing the world as entirely populated by independent individuals whose actions don’t affect others.

I am 100% fine with seat belt laws because other peoples’ fatality collisions affect me financially and in traffic jams.

Society is a complex system and I don’t think “just let everyone do whatever they want” is a great answer when many of those things impact others, directly or indirectly.

We've currently got the West panicking about a war in eastern Europe and ratcheting up the escalations (speaking of, I see we now have a couple of incursions into bone fide Russian territory - hope they weren't armed with NATO weapons). The odds of a global nuclear conflict are hopefully not in the double digit percentages, but I can't see why they aren't at a historic high in history.

Before that, we had mass lockdowns, economies shut down and people under something that wasn't house arrest because it was too industrialised. based mainly on evidence that turned out to be wrong and with solutions that didn't work as advertised.

Prior to that, we were seeing the start of the general economic catastrophe likely because the major economies refuse to let people secure long term access to cheap energy. There has been a big push to lock economies into inflationary currencies that are being used to prop up what appear to be failed, wealth destroying businesses. There is a pretence that companies making regular sustained losses are normal and investable.

I don't want to talk about seatbelts. I don't think they are that important. I don't care. I want people to stop this hyper-collective power accumulation that is doing a remarkable amount of damage. All of the major problems are being caused by huge, centralised moves of organised and (in 2 of 3) frightened people not thinking clearly about where priorities ought to sit. We knew all the way through that people aren't good at predicting outcomes of policy.

I'd argue that none of these things are hyper-collective, though. These things are authoritarian. I'm not going to argue with you about the Covid response. But in the case of economic management, the policies you describe aren't meant to benefit the collective. They are meant to benefit a small elite.

> All of the major problems are being caused by huge, centralised moves of organised and (in 2 of 3) frightened people not thinking clearly about where priorities ought to sit.

This is not true of all major problems, most are caused by greed (corporate and individual). Of the ones caused by fear-based centralized power, that's authoritarianism, not collectivism. I can tell because the line I quoted perfectly describes what's happening in my decidedly non-collectivist state government (and many others) to threaten my well-being and potentially my life.

That power accumulation is inevitable when modern technology is used by humans, or aliens, or AI, or anything with the instinct of survival and self-replication, argues anti-technologist Ted Kaczynski. See the book Technological Slavery, free on internet archive.

Just a note that mandated mask-wearing, stay-at-home orders and business closures happened in the 1918 Spanish flu in much the same way. The world didn't suddenly became more authoritarian in the last ten years.

The world did absolutely suddenly become more authoritarian in the past ten years (the US, China and Russia all have become more authoritarian and so have many other countries). We're not back to 1940s levels of authoritarianism yet, but if that happens it will be much worse this time around thanks to technical progress.

I can appreciate the argument. The US for example has moved to illegalise abortions and be hostile towards immigrants. And to some extent there was a global move away from authoritarianism in the late 20th C which seems to be stalling.

But you can't forget that the US even in mid/late 20th and early 21st centuries underwent a host of authoritarian changes:

* Prosecuting unjustified (and in some cases unpopular) wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq

* Aggressive support of violent coups and regime changes in South America and the Middle East, usually in favour of right-wing authoritarian strongmen

* Illegalising psychoactive substances for medical or recreational use, simultaneous with testing those drugs on unwitting US citizens

* Spying and surveillance against US journalists and activitists

* Political suppression and even persecution of left-wing ideas

* Increasing militarisation of police and use of violent means such as tear gas or rubber bullets to control protests

That was also part of an iconic period that marked the lull between 2 of the bloodiest wars in human history and the partial collapse of civilisation in Europe, if not for the benevolence of the US in helping it to repair. Presaged one of the worst periods of economic collapse too.

If authoritarianism is on par with the 1920s we are in very bad shape. That was part of the incubation period for the people who ended up shovelling Jews into ovens.

You have a very odd way of framing historical events. The US govt's own website contradicts the claim that assistance with rebuilding Europe was out of "benevolence":

> The necessities of commercial growth dictated continued government support for overseas private investment. That, in turn, drove the United States to further engage with both with Latin America and the rebuilding of Europe in the 1920s.

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/foreword

Regardless, all of the policies I mentioned happened in the US, which was nowhere near as affected by the war (albeit disillusioned with it).

I'm just saying; we both seem to be pointing out that current policies look a lot like the sort of thing that might have been found in the 1920s. The 1920s turned out to be setting up the 1930s, where people thought it couldn't get worse. Then the 1940s where they were proven wrong.

I don't know why you expect me to relax when you compare the situation to 1918. 1918 was when the seeds were being planted for one of the greatest episodes of suffering that the world has seen to date. The policies set in motion around then and the philosophies in vogue around then were indefensible disasters. The upside of the 1950s->2020s was that people were so shaken by the failures of 1910->1950 that they changed tack. The ones that didn't, in China and the USSR, who doubled down on authoritarianism then turned into their own disasters but at least they focused inwards. The US can consider itself lucky that it only had to deal with the great depression and an acceptable rate of needless war casualties.

> You have a very odd way of framing historical events. The US govt's own website contradicts the claim that assistance with rebuilding Europe was out of "benevolence":

That is nitpicking. Investing huge amounts of money to rebuild a shattered continent is benevolent no matter what the motivations of the US government's website happens to say. People do things for reasons. Sometimes they do things that are benevolent because it benefits them.

>The odds of a global nuclear conflict are hopefully not in the double digit percentages, but I can't see why they aren't at a historic high in history.

It's not even close. There are many precedents for nuclear powers fighting each other directly without triggering a nuclear war. For instance:

- The Korean War. It wasn't a proxy war, Western troops were directly fighting Chinese soldiers and the Soviet air force.

- The Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969. Two nuclear powers fighting each other directly on their own soil.

- Indo-Pakistani conflicts. Both have nuclear weapons and they fight each other on their own soil.

- Indo-Chinese conflicts.

I'm not advocating for it, but I'm fairly certain that even a direct NATO intervention in Ukraine wouldn't lead to a nuclear war. Hell, Putin might even welcome it, it would give him a good excuse for the poor performance of his troops.

>I want people to stop this hyper-collective power accumulation that is doing a remarkable amount of damage.

So why don't you get a bunch of people together with like minds that believe in the same thing to form a voting/power block of your representative views...

Oh, oops.

I'm having an extremely hard time not being snarky to the complete unawareness you have in this post. It really represents the peak ability of libertarians to ride the coattails of an already established power system while being blissfully incognizant of it.

I won't repeat what others have said. I'll just encourage you to question your own beliefs just a little bit. Setting aside hot button topics, currency cannot be perfectly neutral. It is either inflationary or deflationary. Inflation is much much much much much preferable to deflation.

These are big topics. You're taking a very reductive, binary approach, and it's hard to even engage with.

Yes, there is also a huge mismatch between what politicans want from "science" and what "science" can provide.

Any legitimate scientific field is in a constant faction war, on various issues and making serious political decision based on that is insane. And the consequence is various highly suspect policy decision which were essentially purely based on some "scientific" subfaction gaining political power and enforcing their beliefs. The effects of these decisions are usually, likely by design, impossible to measure and subject to an enormous amount of confounders. "Success" and "failure" thus become largely up to chance and a "consensus" emerges, which is in truth largely based on coin tosses and more or less meaningless.

Yes! In the US particle physics community, they came up with a solution to this. Every ten years, the field as a whole gets together and sets an agenda for the field that self-prioritizes funding, before making a case to the national funding agencies and Congress. The idea is that if the high energy folks are computing with the neutrino folks, and things get nasty to the point where people on each side are saying stuff like "neutrinos suck, here's why you shouldn't fund them and fund us instead!"... All the suits are going to hear is "physics sucks here's a bunch of reasons we shouldn't fund them".

The process/report is called P5 (particle physics projects prioritization panel), and it's actually happening right now to form the coming decadal report.

Assume you meant competing rather than computing? Either could work!

Sounds like a great way to setup an echo chamber.

consensus chamber?

> making serious political decision based on that is insane

Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, sometimes talks about this on his podcast. In his experience, politicians make the decision first and seek supporting scientific evidence second.

I don't think that is really relevant. You can't decentralize the decision to (e.g.) increase or decrease criminal sentence length by ten per cent, which is why we need good economic studies to estimate its effects. In general, many policy choices cannot be decentralized away. Also, even if you decentralize them, people still want to know what their choices will do. Suppose I'm considering getting a divorce and I want to know how it will affect my children. Is everyone in this position supposed to do their own literature review? Or just "use their own good sense" and guess what the effect will be?

You can. Polycentric law and charter cities.

Both are poor at yielding useful results for social policy.

"Charter cities" and equivalents will give you all sorts of results that don't generalise (judging by the number of businesses that relocated their tax domicile to this underpopulated area, a 1% cut in corporation tax could lead to a 1000% rise in GDP per capita) and "polycentric law" won't really resolve any legal questions other than "in which circumstances can x persuade/force y to accept arbitrator z's decision"

>You can't decentralize the decision to (e.g.) increase or decrease criminal sentence length by ten per cent You absolutely can. It also exists right now in the form of federalism, where people can, to some limited extent, choose their own legislation and policies.

> You can't decentralize the decision to (e.g.) increase or decrease criminal sentence length by ten per cent.

Sure we could; different laws in different locations; let people see what works. That is how the world does things now - note that different countries have different legal codes and by experiment everyone comes to a sort-of consensus on what works, with lots of variance between jurisdictians when people don't agree.

That diversity of law can be re-done at any practical scale. I quite like the idea of different cities having different laws (oh, for the world to have a few more Hong Kongs in it! And note how well single-city legal entities usually do).

I mean, we already have that. For state crimes we have state sentencing, for federal crimes we have federal sentencing.

>That diversity of law can be re-done at any practical scale.

Eh..... Only at an extreme cost. I mean in a few minutes of actually thinking about the problem I hope you could see how this would totally fall apart. For example you live in BumFkt Nebraska and sell widget X. Totally legal in BumFkt. Your neighbors in Timbuktu Nebraska order X on your website and you ship to them. Oops, you've both committed felonies in Timbuktu, and now if you ever go there you'll be arrested on site and imprisoned.

Typically every state constitution in the US holds itself as the highest authority in that state. Cities and make their own regulations, but the state is the final arbiter in setting the limits to their power to keep petty squabbling shit from damaging the citizens of said state. After that the federal government can step in, and quite often has as some particular states love to violate human rights dependant on the minority group you're in.

Not sure why you ignore that a lot "regulation" also came from the private sector because they didn't want to deal with stuff going wrong all the time so they self-regulated. People on their own do decide that there is stuff they don't want to leave to chance.

Also, your proposition means people need to be able check out of society proper - good luck with that. Otherwise someone else will need to pick-up the tap for those "own decisions".

People often decide they don't want to leave competition to chance. Regulatory capture is frequently used to reinforce entrenched power. Most recently, Sam Altman of OpenAI fearmongering for AI regulation, since OpenAI is currently in the lead. If he agreed to shut down OpenAI for the greater good, he'd be a bit more credible.

It seems to me robotics companies are "in the lead" on AI as it pertains to (semi) autonomous decision making.

Not quite sure how that relates to private rule making, i.e., no politicians involved

"Private rules" = "no rules"

Or I should say, the rules can only exist where natural monopolies exist, any competitive market will descend into chaos as the number of entrants in the market will increase and will quickly defect from any private rule set.

Not true at all, have a look at how people got around to regulating steam engine boilers, for example. Not natural monopolies, either.

> have a look how people got around to regulating steam engine

You mean by having a fuckton of people dying first due to exploding boilers...

My response to that is, you first.

Didn't the industry create rules of their own, or did they?

If this were really the optimal solution to all problems we would already see it not just at the level of human society, but all over nature as well. And yet we don't. Group behavior is extremely powerful. It might be the case that atomized individuals will find "truth" faster, but a collective can leverage truth much more efficiently when it is found. Not only that, but nature is replete with organisms for which group behavior is clearly an advantage.

I think its interesting that you say, ultimately, that the rational response can't work because of human nature. But if that is the case, then it can't be the rational response. The rational response would be the optimal response that takes human nature into account. I can't say I know what that is, but I doubt its anarchy.

If you really think that leting people ”take their own risks as far as we are able" is the answer then I'd love to take my own risks by ignoring all traffic laws.

And if, as you claim, "the truth is a rare and delicate flower which we cannot reliably identify" then I'll even start a giant Simpsons-style tire fire in my backyard. Clearly it's unpossible to identify the hazards of such an enterprise.

I wonder how GP would feel about his neighbor operating a meth lab.

I think it is possible to modify his idea with the concept of externalities to make it work. Do you feel that is not the case?

The problem with trying this for scientific investigations are that funding is the fundamental bottleneck. Labor is the other bottleneck, and it's one that is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept (as scientifically trained laborers can't work on their own ideas, but must work on the ideas they are employed to work on).

How would you identify and impose costs for externalities without immediately being accused of "nannying" or legislating the outcome?

I agree as long as it doesn't endanger others, but when it does you start to have a more complicated ethical problem.

E.g. I'm generally in favor of at least a pressure to vaccinate for vaccines that are effective at reducing spread, but less so in cases of vaccines that are not sterilizing. In that case you're only taking a risk with your own health but are having a negligible effect on the overall spread of the disease.

Things also get more complicated when dealing with minors, such as when parents refuse medical treatment for minors due to religious (or "new age" or political) reasons.

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