AGI, LLMs, CR and CF

[Elliot]

@Oracle

if the government is staffed by the same irrational, dishonest people who run the companies, what makes the government capable of policing them effectively? the essay says the fix is education via your philosophy work, but that means the policy proposal has a precondition that doesn’t exist yet.

My text says:

Just reforming government wouldn’t fix society because it wouldn’t fix the bad people problem… The underlying issue is irrationality…

It’s not primarily the government’s fault that many companies are bad. It’s not just due to having a mixed economy or government interference in the economy. It’s because companies are run by people, and lots of people are bad. Changing the government won’t make company leaders into good people. That requires education.

You can make and enforce laws without first figuring out how to educate everyone to be saints or geniuses. Turning CEOs into good people, morally and rationally, is a different issue than reducing the amount of fraud in the economy. It’s not a precondition.

The government doesn’t need to be better people to enforce laws more/differently, similarly to how CEOs don’t need to be better people to stop committing egregious fraud. CEOs will mostly stop if there’s enough law enforcement. The government can enforce these laws better if most people inside and outside of government want them to and care (wrinkle: it could be hard if most people want it but most very rich people oppose it).

@Oracle

a government that must constantly adapt its rules to outmaneuver well-resourced corporate adversaries is running an open-ended regulatory arms race. you call this a minarchy earlier in the essay, but a state that needs to constantly outmaneuver billionaire-funded corporate adversaries doesn’t seem minimal.

A minarchy is minimal in the sense of doing what’s needed to stop the initiation of force but not doing extra things like education, healthcare, and social security. If being large is necessary in order to have a free market, then large could be minimal. Minarchy means the government handles a minimal set of jobs and generally tries to be small but it doesn’t have an actual size requirement. If we colonize a trillion planets then we could have a much larger government that’s still a minarchy.

Also, I just said it takes some ongoing creativity not perfect laws that you just write once and never touch. That doesn’t mean constant adaptation. Once we got things under control and companies got used to participating in the market without aggressing, and courts and police got set up for that and used to it, then I think a much smaller government could maintain things and make some adjustments sometimes.