Comment by NotAtWork | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotAtWork | Hacker News Reader

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> Why can't we have a system where we argue things out and have some heuristics for finding out what the best decision is for a given group of people?

We do this.

We just haven't resolved two fundamental problems:

1. The heuristics are not faithfully stated nor evaluated. This actually has upsides and downsides, as it allows them to be unexpectedly flexible and comprehensive at the cost of some corruption and unpredictability. This may just be a fundamental trade-off of such metrics. The heuristics are just currently embodied in little sacks of meat with some extra processes happening, because of stand-alone computers being a relatively new thing. (I'm actually not sure how much better with regards to lack of corruption and transparency we could make the heuristics than "just pick a guy to choose", because of limits in decidability and other related computer science/math.)

2. We don't know any way to define 'best outcome' besides ask everyone what they think, and resolve conflicts with some kind of strategy like "go with what the most people think is the right answer".

So I really don't understand your position: it's essentially that you don't see value in participating in which heuristics are chosen, and think that people should pay more attention to your wants and desires, even if you don't advocate for them with the same strength as other people.

Honestly, your position mostly sounds poorly thought out and entitled.

> 2. We don't know any way to define 'best outcome' besides ask everyone what they think

I disagree. Here's a better way: empiricism (through federalism). Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people. But we've long closed the federalist "democracy lab" dream.

I'm sorry if this comes across as poorly thought out and entitled. I have thought long and hard about these things and I'm a libertarian so there's very little I think I'm entitled to (especially by the government).

> Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people.

This only makes the chunking smaller, not fundamentally removes the chunking that you objected to. ("Chunking" in this sense meaning that we have a region ("chunk") that has to all follow the same law picked by some fixed (possibly local) strategy, such as majority wins or other common voting strategy.)

I actually agree with the concept that the chunks should be smaller about many things than they currently are in the US, and that the US generally has too many federal laws.

The problem with your answer to the question posed, however, is that we still aren't sure what we mean by "best", except just to ask every body and take some kind of "most popular answer wins" or averaging strategy. Fixing a heuristic like "best" allows you to deduce (most of) the rest of the things you need to figure out.

One obvious potential problem with this strategy, which is the point of federalism to address, is that the equilibrium reached by allowing each chunk to vary its laws and people to move freely between them, is that we might settle on to a suboptimal equilibrium (or never converge) which is considerably worse than one we might have discovered via planning.

Obviously, the current state of affairs isn't what many people would think of as optimal either. So the question, at least as I see it, becomes "What mechanic do we focus our effort on to fix?"

As someone who thinks that voting is a useful mechanic, my answer would be that addressing the voting mechanics would allow the law to more accurately reflect the desires of people governed and allow for better selection of heuristics for decision making.

Your stance seems to favor just removing large segments of what exists, and seeing what gets invented to fill in the gaps.

> Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people.

This happened before but it ended up widely unpopular. It is called the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. Best outcome is extremely subjective as well.

What happened:

After prohibition most states elected a minimum legal drinking age of 21.

The 26th amendment comes around in 1971 which made the voting age 18. In response 29 states lowered the drinking age.

The lower drinking age states saw in increase in motor vehicle fatalities. Particularly in the 18-21 group.

The Feds decided if states want 100% of their highway construction funds they had to make the drinking age 21 to reduce highway fatalities.

You can argue that "less dead youths" is a best outcome even though pretty much everyone still wants the drinking age to be 18.

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