Rants from an gamer

[vlad321]

Kasz216 said:

vlad321 said:

Kasz216 said:

sapphi_snake said:

That's true, but it's hard to see what could be better.

Yeah.  Your original thought would be some sort of proportional voting based on intellegence but this has a few issues.

1) The first being, that inellegence doesn't actually correlate with good politics that well... or anything.  Intellegence actually seems to be more of a "requriement" then a straight up "power level."  (Freaknomics has a good chapter on this... or was it one of the Malcolm gladwell books...)

 

2) Even if you did have some sort of "Intellegence quota."  I mean, some people are just naturally smarter then others.   It's not really there fault... a lot of people even if they try can't get a lot of stuff.  


Really too, a world where the dumb are picked on instead of the smart would actually be worse.  I mean, smart people have the advantage of "One day i'll be your boss!"

If dumb people get picked on... what relief do they have?  One day i'll... be serving you at mcdonalds and spit in your food?

We don't need to favor smart over dumb or any race. We just need to favor practical over impractical. There are plenty of dumb people who can be practical and are open to such ideas. There are also a lot of intelligent people who are impractical.

Now before you ask how we define what practicality is, just set is as the greatest reduction of misery for the greatest number of people.

Practicality is a lot harder thing to judge In a lot of cases based on those terms.

Largely, because reducing the greatest amount of misery for the greatest number of people short term, leads to less reduction of misery long term.

For example, the US doesn't have universal healthcare, buuuuut because of this, private and public companies spend way more on medical research.  There is more money spent on medical research in the United States then every other country combined.  That's why there are so many medical advanaces coming out of the US.

Put in a government healthcare plan, and you reduce some misery short term but increase misery long term due to medical technology ending up backwords.  Furthermore you end up pushing the costs of it all on government, which governments have shown they can't handle constantly growing costs.

It's why tons of europeon reasearchers come to the US.  I'd guess US proffessors tend to make more then their europeon counterparts as well, based on similiar reasoning. (A lot of paid research is done through grants to universities.)

It also allows the arguement for things like proactive wars, since chances are probable things would be better long term for short term pain.

 

Or the most famous argument... foreign aid.  As it is, foreign aid to africa seems to do nothing but create more people to live horrible lives off foreign aid, mostly do too systemic problems with africa

Your last argument is a lot more along the lines of "teach to fish, give fish," in which case it is more practical to fix the problems in Africa than to just give them aid. That would require a lot more work than people want to put into it (because lo and behold, there is no immidiate pay off to it and capitalism is broken like that).

Honestly by far the best economic system, and from it social, would be to just find a solution as close to the optimum as possible given game thoery. Considering that the way we work right now is the way Nash pointed out, which is literally the explanation of how capitalism works, we should learn from his work and notice the optimum is different than his equilibrium. Basically, when everyone acts in their best interest the result is that the equillibrium is almost never the optimum result. We just have to find a way to put down the optimum result and then enforce it. It would solve many many problems.