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Forums - Politics Discussion - About democracy and other ideas for government

Mr Khan on 11 July 2013

Yours is the same fever dream espoused by Plato.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

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Slimebeast on 11 July 2013

Another well written OP TheLivingShadow. You're great at writing and discussing. I will follow all your threads.



Scoobes on 11 July 2013

Personally, I think the original Deus Ex had the right idea; humans are unfit to govern themselves.

Therefore, we need an incredibly advanced AI capable of storing and processing all the world's information/data to determine public policies. That would include being able to process all the latest information to come out of the latest research and applying that to new policies (especially relevant would be social sciences, psychology & neuroscience so that people can be appeased). Let's face it, intelligence agencies are already using computer algorithms to trawl through the worlds data, this is simply taking it a step further.

Not going to happen anytime soon in terms of feasibility and highly unlikely to happen at all due to human nature.




Get your Portable ID!

mai on 12 July 2013
ArnoldRimmer said:
mai said:

But if you really want to talk about it, here's my idea. Every citizen has a point table and earns points for various things like social, business activity or anything else this given society considers "good", for "bad" things like criminal activity you receive penalty. In other words. You have kids? Here's you 10 points per kid. You own an enterprise and create jobs? Here's your 1 point per every $10 you make, etc. The more points you get, the more valuable citizen you are, the more your vote will weight compared to others. It's census, but more flexible than straightforward property qualification. I do not claim it will work or it's any good though :D

I feel a certain sympathy for the general idea of different people's votes having different weights.

But I see a lot of potential for abuse in your concrete suggestion. First of all, your suggestion really comes down to the idea of measuring every citizen's "value", which definitely doesn't fit with modern humanistic ideals. And even if you ignore that, it's impossible to think of really fair and reasonable measurements.

Not sure how it contradicts humanistic ideals, though given how broad the definition of humanism could be -- well, it might contradicts smth somewhere. But I do not insist the idea is good, I know it'll be abused and eventually useless, and I know it won't be accepted (I addressed that in last paragraph of my original post) -- the latter should be fixed first, i.e. said "humanistic ideals", before moving further and fixing political system.

P.S. Measurements don't need to be fair and reasonable, there just need to be any kind of measurements majority more or less agrees on (f*ck minorities). I dunno, how about ten commandements for starters?



ArnoldRimmer on 12 July 2013
mai said:

Not sure how it contradicts humanistic ideals, though given how broad the definition of humanism could be -- well, it might contradicts smth somewhere. But I do not insist the idea is good, I know it'll be abused and eventually useless, and I know it won't be accepted (I addressed that in last paragraph of my original post) -- the latter should be fixed first, i.e. said "humanistic ideals", before moving further and fixing political system.

P.S. Measurements don't need to be fair and reasonable, there just need to be any kind of measurements majority more or less agrees on (f*ck minorities). I dunno, how about ten commandements for starters?

Since humans are selfish, just make the majority believe that THEY would gain from this system ("People from the middle class get 100 bonus points!"), and they'll probably accept it.



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Kasz216 on 12 July 2013

Corruption will ALWAYS rise to the top.

Even if you are EXTREMELY lucky, and you get a super awesome, non corrupt dictator who wants the best for everybody and is smart enough to act on it....

the next guy is going to be complete shit and ruin everything.


This has been proven to be no different in a Technocracy. A Large problem is that smart people aren't actually as smart as you'd think they are... and often have huge weaknesses due to their own arrogance and presumption.

The best example of this is actually probably an episode of the Simpsons funny enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Saved_Lisa%27s_Brain


The truth is... the dumb need representation as much as everybody else for their preferences. Hell more so, because the dumb are... dumb and therefore have less ability to get what they want individually.  Sure the smart may want to provide for the poor, but in general, the smarter you are, the harder it is to end up not being a hugely patronising douche who doesn't listen to the poor. (Not that all poor people are stupid, but you get the point.)