Re: Good political thinking made more compelling

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jan 07 2002 - 08:38:18 MST


One way of making libertarian ideas more common is to read, learn from
and then apply Hayek's _The Intellectuals and Socialism_.

In general, we need better visions of what a libertarian society would
entail. Not just the big abstract stuff, but everyday life. This is how
much of socialism in its various forms got so powerful: a lot of
visions and stories about how things would work in the new society.
Sure, they were wrong, but as long as we do not provide any counterpart
(ideally correct too, of course :-) libertarianism will always seem
abstract and infeasible. It is when you realize how garbage collection,
schools and apartment buildings would work in libertaria things start to
happen.

This is why having a social sim would be so useful. Even a simple, crude
analogy can carry a lot of punch - this is why the Prisoner's Dilemma is
so important (and another thing children should learn from).

In most god-sims the perspective is inherently centralist - you tend
micromanage (or at least decide) everything, and due to the limits of
game AI this is usually the only feasible alternative.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 13:37:33 MST