RE: Unfairness of tax cuts for the rich explained in beer
I wrote over at Quora:
I thought I wasn’t going to continue, but I’ve had some other conversations on Quora since we last spoke which are influencing my thinking on our discussion.
I agree that society has a form of a Nash equilibrium discouraging defection, but I don’t view that as entirely benign:
My motivation is not an ego battle with you. I am very open to being humble about my intellectual limitations. My original reason for starting this discussion with you, is I find it disturbing that you promote an idea which AFAICT would essentially require euthanizing more than half of the population in order to achieve. Thus I had a confirmation bias from the start that your hypothesis must violate some invariants of nature. Also I find it disturbing because as I mentioned in the above linked discussion, eggs are dear and sperm is cheap. IOW, there aren’t even enough high IQ females to make such a “perfect” society resilient. And the earth may be entering a very challenging phase where such resiliency is required to be held in reserve just in case of a long-tail catastrophe:
Countries Vulnerable to Economic Devastation Soon
I’m wondering if this is a tendency of INTJs to be capable of inadvertently supporting the precursors of megadeath, because you’re not the first INTJ I’ve met who favors democracy, social justice, and what not. I am ENTP.
The interesting part of this result is that pursuing individual reward logically leads both of the prisoners to betray when they would get a better reward if they both kept silent.
On the flip side, groupthink leads for example to sheep strangling each other because of their ignorance. And democracy is at its generative essence a power vacuum that by definition demands the most corrupt power:
WD-40 (for reducing Rust with the next mainstream language) · Issue #35 · keean/zenscript
(read from the bottom of the above linked post backwards)
Unfairness of Tax Cuts For The Rich Explained In Beer
Yes it has. Athens for example.
I meant hasn’t happened here.
James A. Donald articulates the point of my WD-40 post above most succinctly:
Progressives know no history, because everything before the current year is shameful and hateful…
You wrote:
I find ideology, whether of the left or the right, absurd.
Then why do you argue for democracy in spite of the historical record and the logic that it is a power vacuum. Surely you know what power vacuum means.
If the mean of the cycle of megadeath is for example 309 years, then looking back a couple of hundred years is vulnerable to aliasing error. We’re also in the third instance of sixth 309 year wave with declining solar output and civilization collapse ahead:
Even if we did raise the mean cognitive capability of the human race to the current 140 IQ level, we would still have a bell curve. And moreover my point was that very high IQ people support democracy despite the fact that it’s a power vacuum wherein everyone is actually defecting whether they realize it or not. My interest in decentralized ledgers (Byzantine fault tolerant consensus) is being driven by the desire to find a solution to this power vacuum issue that has existed since antiquity.
Again I write none of this out of disrespect for you Sir. I am just very concerned. And to the extent I have an Dunning-Kruger effect going on, I do apologize in advance. And I am by no means trying to embarrass you. I am just as I said, concerned.
I also wrote on Quora:
I agree with your point about personal responsibility. I believe every person is unique and has a role to play in the resiliency of our species. I wrote this:
Lol, I’m 5′7″ and I’m highly explosive, have adrenalin spikes that can blow the doors out, don’t think enough before acting, athletic, and competitive in basketball, American football, boxing, track & field, badminton, etc.. And my IQ is not above 180.
Note you may be aware that there’s a phenomenon referred to “being in the zone” where for a highly attuned athlete the environment slows down into slow motion and we can process the information in real-time as if they we’re thinking it through beforehand. I have experienced this effect and it is very exhilarating.
Conversely, I would not be able to organize complex information as quickly or as comprehensively as you would. Although I’m not aware of data as to whether a high convergent IQ guarantees a highly creative divergent aptitude?
As for workarounds, one of the strategies (heuristics) I seem to employ is premature intuition and generalization. This positions the mind in a potentially proximate location in the map which can then be refined to determine if there’s a match on the details. However I presume a direct synthesis of the complex details is more greedy, but it would also overshoot when the solution space is not deterministic.