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RE: What does a truly decentralized government look like?

in #government8 years ago (edited)

decentralized governance won't be possible. Imagine a group of people discussing where to go to eat dinner. The discussion will take hours unless someone takes matters in his/her hand and have the final say.

You always forget to take into consideration the human nature.

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What is human nature?

"Human nature is neither inherently good, nor inherently evil. The thought-experiment that I like to use is the blank-room experiment. If a person is born into such a room and locked without provision of significant stimuli, all you get is a blank person. The environment is an important factor.

If humans are quite similar to computers, then the environment is our operating condition / operating system.

And indeed, we are quite similar to computers. Our operating condition creates the human condition.

You can think of cultures as operating systems, beliefs as softwares, behaviours as outputs, and life as what it appears on screen.

We are programmable.

And that's human nature."

https://steemit.com/philosophy/@kevinwong/what-is-human-nature

Accepting your destiny that is being programmed and accepting that you can't change it because it's bound to happen or it's predetermined, it's known as fatalism :) I am a big fan of free will :)

That doesn't necessarily mean predestination (although I subscribe to it). I think the human condition needs to be submerged in an environment that rewards goodness, instead of selfishness etc that we see around the world. I believe in building technologies and environments that promote better forms of free-will (with better choices to be made) :)

Oh I agree. if anything, I am the first to say that technology or Internet changed my life for better. But still, even in Steemit there is jealousy, if we consider it as a negative feeling of course, for example :)

free will is constrained by knowledge, the freedom is limited. it's a very interesting thought experiment that i have conducted on myself a few times, you'd be surprised how limited it really is...

I strongly agree. You might like this essay: https://www.leadershipinstitute.org/resources/files/THE%20REAL%20NATURE%20OF%20POLITICS.pdf

I learned how to be a "pushy people programmer" and was one for several years. I learned that what I said wasn't as important to people as whether they wanted to "be like me." If I looked poorly-dressed, or had acne, or was tired, or didn't smile as much, the same message would be discarded. This indicates that people lack the capacity to assess the message on its own merits, because they never got proper History, Economics, Law, or Philosophy in school. Instead, they are using a crude heuristic measure to decide whether what I had to say was valuable. It's been my experience that so-called anarchists or "mainstream voluntaryists," etc. are not much more intelligent than the average American "Democrat" or "Republican" idiot (both of which oppose democracy and the republic).

Your own example is contrary to your point. People effectively decide where to go for dinner every day without having a King to decide. Just because people concede the decision to others at times does not mean it isn't decentralised governance.

It is easy to say something is not possible before it is attempted. :) Experimentation is key. Many things thought impossible are no longer remotely considered impossible today. I suspect the same will continue into the future. In general stating absolutes tends to be a dangerous proposition, unless your goal is to be wrong. There is a difference between saying something highly improbable and saying something impossible. To know the absolutes on impossibility and possibility you'd need to believe in some omniscient Godlike being, but you would need to take it further than that. You would also need to assume that you are that being since you deal in absolutes. ;)

that's the main issue with political systems. you can't experiment with them. Theoretically speaking, neither democracy nor communism are bad ideas but they failed to consider the human nature.

Can't. Another absolute? This time I will ask you plainly. Are you a God? Do you know everything that is possible, and is not possible? Do you know everything that can and cannot be done? If so, I'd like to know how you come to that conclusion. IMPOSSIBLE, and CAN'T are very dangerous words to be throwing around unless you are knowledgeable on all things. I'll assume your answer to my questions is NO. So therefore, you don't know what CAN be done or what might be POSSIBLE. You like me and the rest of us are limited by the things you have knowledge of. We all are limited by such things. No one individual gets to dictate what IS and IS NOT possible. That was kind of the point of decentralizing things and crowd sourcing them, as together we all know a lot more about things than any one individual among us can know. Some may think they KNOW IT ALL but show me that person and I'll give you a jester costume for them to wear. The fool is the person who claims to know it all. ;)

Everything is impossible until it is done. Only Siths deal in absolutes.
Experiment away! The future looks BRIGHT!
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I think you should calm down and I would suggest you not to read my mind. I never said decentralization is a bad idea or that I am God. I am simply stating my OPINION based on discussion with other knowledgeable people and my personal studies and research. If anything please provide evidence against my "silly" opinion, instead of twisting my words and going off the topic. Thank you

@thebluepanda, I was reading the post and than this discussion, what @dwinblood want's to say is, a handhold device with out a cord that would enable you to communicate with a person on the other side of the planet in real time was "impossible" in the 80's. Yet we have phones today, to simplify even more, he reffers to your use of words like "can't" or "impossible", that's what "bugs" @dwinblood, as he explains it:

To know the absolutes on impossibility and possibility you'd need to believe in some omniscient Godlike being, but you would need to take it further than that. You would also need to assume that you are that being since you deal in absolutes. ;)

So, @dwinblood is attempting here to teach you not to "toss around" these words like that, especially in a intellectual discussion.

IMHO @dwinblood may have reacted a bit too "aggressively" on this what you may have interpreted as an "attack" on you, but it's not and In the end all he wanted is to teach you something.

@minion I like free education, I have no problem about that. but I would prefer an answer to the issue that I mentioned in my first comment, instead the discussion turned into a lesson of how I should discuss intellectually :)

I did not read your mind, or I would not have asked you a question. I did say I assumed your answer would be NO. I have no problem with you saying something is highly improbable. That was my point. You are saying CAN'T and IMPOSSIBLE and I don't see how you can be in a position to know what IS NOT POSSIBLE. If you are then I'd like to know how to do that too. :) I'm pretty calm. You didn't state it was an opinion either. You simply stated it was first IMPOSSIBLE and then said CAN'T. If you had said in your opinion, or even said you didn't think it was likely, or highly improbable, any of those types of things that leave room for you being wrong... I wouldn't have had anything to say. In saying such things you could be right. I don't know how probable it is. Yet IMPOSSIBLE and CAN'T are typically not true. ;) As an opinion though... sure. If you like closing doors on possibility that is totally your right. I also did not TWIST a single word. I described them accurately and am trying to get you to think about what you are saying. I don't actually think you know what is IMPOSSIBLE just as I don't know either. Yet, you like many people casually use absolutes when they are not casual words. They have very distinct meanings. So if you didn't mean what they actually mean then it was you that was twisting the meanings of the words in your own head and EXPECTING us to read your mind and know what you meant. I don't read minds. :) If you know how to do that though, that'd be cool to know as well. (again... I am calm. Just trying to get you to realize the flaw in your statement)

Now not talking about the other words. Whenever a new political system is attempted for the first time, that is essentially an experiment. Anything new we try could be viewed as an experiment. We hopefully learn from failures as well as successes. Political systems seem to be one of the places when it fails they try to keep forcing it anyway.

An experiment is a procedure carried out to support, refute, or validate a hypothesis. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results.

now it's my turn to pick on your words :P decentralization as a political system is an idea, a concept, a system. You don't experiment with ideas, you implement them :)

Sure and the hypothesis is that a political system will work. Anytime you try something knew you are working on a hypothesis that what you are about to attempt could be the solution to a problem. ;)

Physics is an idea. Newtonia physics is an idea. Relativity is an idea. Quantum physics is an idea. Engineering is an idea. All ideas do start as a hypothesis. You are correct that an experiment is performed to either prove, or disprove a hypothesis. Which is what should be done. It should be attempted and proven it will not work before simply saying it won't work. :)

It is better to find the road that leads to Rome before you get there.

@thebluepanda: You forget that decentralised automated consensus protocols lower the cost enormously, and allow automatic compilation of opinions and as Steem demonstrates, this can be based on a stake that represents your investment in the system as a whole, and furthermore, that you can increase that stake by repeatedly successfully consolidating the wisdom of the crowd into your own opinions, thus making you an effective representative.

steemit is not decentralized yet!

steemit.com isn't . but i already have esteem installed... there will be more apps that work through RPC and I personally have a proposal for a combined routing/caching system for eliminating location surveillance of members, which takes it to the next logical step (I am doing a brush-up of my c programming skills so I can do it properly).

Incidentally, this brings up an interesting idea. Hosting steemit could be distributed too. Though the DNS is obviously centralised, even then, there could be the use of a namecoin or similar blockchain name system, that also refers to the multiple hosters.

You are such a wise and beautiful girl, it's just amazing ;D
Cheers!

I'm sure people say a decentralized currency couldn't happen either..