From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 11:33:27 MDT
At 09:16 AM 6/24/2003 -0700, Peter McCluskey wrote:
> >>... we would all better off if we could make a binding agreement to be
> >>as close to truthful Bayesians as our computational powers allow.
> >
> >Yes, except on the key question of not facing uncomfortable truths. If
> >people really place a high enough value on this, we do them harm by making
> >them truthful, even if that aids cooperation on all other fronts.
>
>My impression is that the harm involved is substantially reduced if it
>can be coordinated such that few people need to be significantly more
>truthful than their peers at any one time. The benefits of deception seem
>to be largely a matter of competition for relative advantages over other
>people.
If this is true, then yes, coordinating toward truth is best.
> >... can't people just not look at the prices? Most people never read
> >the business stock page in the paper, and have little idea of how IBM
> >is doing. The public is amazingly ignorant when they want to be.
>
>I can imagine a stable futarchy in which the majority of voters ignore
>all the issues that are decided by markets or believe the markets produce
>poor enough results that they don't need to agree with the markets. But I
>have trouble imagining how to get from here to there. The only obvious ways
>to get futarchy adopted seem to involve persuading a majority of voters to
>respect those markets more than they currently respect democracy. And that
>would seem to require challenging those voters to either make money on those
>markets or admit there's something wrong with the beliefs they cherish about
>their abilities as voters.
Well there's always the approach where each person thinks he is helping to
fix the problem all those other people have, but not him. This is in part
why people support paternalistic policies. And as voters they mostly do not
support direct democracy, so they do feel they should defer on some issues.
But I agree that this is a serious challenge.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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