Pandemics & Large Scale Projects
Happy Tuesday!
My help today in this time of pandemic is to educate about large scale projects. An pandemic response is a large scale project. The US government with three-hundred million people is a large scale project.
How should we think about these things?
Immediate life-and-death trade-offs are needed in a pandemic. Ongoing life-and-death trade-offs are ever present in governing. My favorite thought exercise for life-and-death scenarios is life-boat ethics. Life boat ethics is a thought experiment similar to the now popular trolley car experiment. I don't like the trolley car version because only one person is involved. In a life boat there only enough resources for say one person on the life boat and then three people involved need to come to a decision where in the trolley scenario only a single person is making the decision. Having multiple people discuss the decision is our pandemic reality today.
Plus with life-boat ethics you get jokes like this one. Bill Clinton, the Pope, and Mayor Daly of Chicago are all on a life boat with only enough water for one person to survive until help arrives. So how to decide? They all agree to take a vote. So they get out pen and paper and write down their votes. Bill Clinton goes first in revealing his vote. Bill voted for himself. The Pope goes, "tsk, tsk, why would you do that?" Bill Clinton says, "As the President of the United States I'm the leader of the free world so it is most important I survive." The Pope's up next. He turns over his vote and he also cast a vote for himself. Bill Clinton goes, "tsk, tsk, what's up with that?" The Pope says, "I'm God's chosen emissary on earth and therefore I should survive." So it looks like it is going to be a stalemate unless Mayor Daly voted for one of the other two. Everyone stares at each other quite some time. After which Mayor Daly smiles, hops up, flips his vote over and there are over three-hundred marks and he says, "I voted for myself and so did all the dead people in Chicago, I win!"
So what life-boat ethics are we being inundated with today?
Of course life-boat ethics is about more than just body count as both the Mayor Daly joke relates and as the trolley-car dilemma specifies. Are women and children saved first? There are people suggesting that since the highest risk is to the elderly then a herd immunity strategy is acceptable. Unnh, no. Ethics 101. A civilization is best judged by its capacity to take of the least among them. Any society that does not take of the elderly, the weak, the young, and the least among them is uncivilized. People who want to sacrifice the elderly are uncivilized.
One other reason I prefer life-boat ethics over trolley ethics is the set of rich traditions such as women and children first. The captain always goes down with the ship. Never leave a soldier behind. Back in the day prior to the American Civil War then the Generals of an army rode in the front line. Ethics. Soldiers also picked their officers. The point here is that the person making the decisions about who gets to live and die should be first in line to die. One of my favorite George Washington stories is from when he served as a British Officer. In one battle with the native Americans he was the only officer to survive. All the others were killed. One account of the battle retold the battle as Washington leading the charge. Washington was six-feet tall. In that era six-feet was noticeably taller. As the biggest and richest guy then Washington also had the biggest horse. Washington lead the charge into battle as the easiest target to hit and yet was the only one to survive. That's life boat ethics. Washington continued to lead the charge into battle even during the Revolutionary War until finally about half way through the war his officers convinced him to stay behind. Think about it. The iconic painting of Washington on a boat in the Delaware river is not just imagination. Washington probably was on the lead boat, standing up, making an easy target of himself.
Can you imagine Washington as President today being informed that the elderly were the most at risk of dying if we opened the economy early and Washington going, "yeah let's do that?"
Again, one thing I think most of us can agree upon is that one measure of our worth is how well we take care of the least among us and therefore our life-boat ethics should target an unqualified life-and-death count. Of course minimizing death counts requires specific remedies for specific demographics like the elderly. Being fair about resources is unethical.
So now that we have dispensed with life-boat ethics then let's talk about solutions.
Now what? Well, let's the try the obvious. Put your best people on it. The best and the brightest. Let them ponder the problem and hopefully they can provide a best case scenario. We trust the experts to realize the best solution a society can offer.
But do we?
Let's take a quick detour down memory lane about "the best and brightest."
I am an aconstitutionist. I do not believe in constitutional government as the best solution. If you think being a atheist is bad, try being an aconstitutionist. I am an atheist and an aconstitutionist for the same reason: lack of evidence.
In our case here I'm specifically referring to "the best and the brightest" hypothesis embedded in the US Constitution. The meritocracy claim was initially made by Thomas Paine. Paine argued that governing is a large scale project and required the best and brightest. He argued that governing is complicated and you need your best person on it. Paine further went on to ridicule monarchy as the worst and the dumbest. Not the least of his arguments was monarchy reduced mental capability due to inbreeding.
Voting on a large scale then was a hypothesis of the best and brightest being relative to monarchy. Still though even back then they didn't trust the average voter completely. This is why the President was chosen by the Congress and not by popular vote.
The US Constitution is an abysmal failure and collosal trash on so many levels but you only need one reason to dispatch with it completely. Voting does not give us the best and brightest. Voting gives us the worst and the dumbest. The worst can be thought of as the most corrupt.
Here's the kicker. We've known this for over one hundred years.
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” ― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
The experiment failed. The experiment of constitutional government has failed. The hypothesis of meritocracy by voting has failed. We are not electing representatives to either Congress or the White House who are the best and brightest. We are electing the worst and dumbest. We are the electing the most corrupt. Democracy is done. Stick a fork in it.
This failure is our demise today regarding the coronavirus. We are literally running the monkey experiment. The monkey experiment is when you take a monkey and you give the monkey a typewriter. You have the monkey start typing until the monkey types the collected works of William Shakespeare. Of course that's never going to happen. And so it is that the political solution for a pandemic is never going to happen in our Democracy today. We don't have the best and brightest.
John Oliver actually joked about this as a Wombat flying an airplane.
But it is not just the President.
Mark Twain noted, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
Albert Einstein observed that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We keep electing the worst and dumbest expecting them to execute as the best and brightest.
We Americans are insane. We expect each election to vote in the best and brightest of the choices we are offered when in fact our choices are not the lesser of two evils, but rather the lesser of the two dumbest.
A wombat can't fly an airplane. A monkey cannot type William Shakespeare. The worst and dumbest cannot run a large scale project created by the best and brightest.
Our world is getting better and brighter every day by technology created by the smartest people society has. Our politics is being run by the dumbest and they are getting dumber.
This is why I am an aconstitutionist. Voting is fundamental to Democracy. Remove voting and you have no Democracy.
The risk of having the worst and dumbest running the world goes up every day as population increases and technology increases. The complexity of the world is increasing daily. The mistakes made by the dumbest and the worst will cost us more and more each year and we are seeing this play out in this pandemic.
We are in an impossible situation created by voting not being a meritocracy. We are asking dumb people to do the smartest thing.
Did the founders see this coming? Provide a solution?
Well, the originators of the US Constitution did see some inherent flaws that were passed anyway. Adams opined, "Whoa be the day the voters realize they can vote themselves money." Because of this flaw then Adams predicated the US Constitution experiment would only last one twenty years. Jefferson saw the mountain of centuries of laws piling up in England as the tyranny of the dead over the living. Because of this Jefferson proposed an amendment to have each generation write its own constitution. However, none of them anticipated that the meritocracy hypothesis of voting would fail. Hamilton wanted a monarchy for President but his reasons for advocating for this were purely political and not based on any evidence that voting was inferior.
This essay is entitled, "Large Scale Projects". Voting does work at smaller scales. This is why voting was chosen initially because it worked at the small scale of colonies. At small scales on the order of one-hundred to say a thousand people then voting does have some validity with respect to being a meritocracy. Where the line of population size where voting breaks down is not the point of this essay, but rather this essay simply points out that for large scale projects voting does not result in the best and brightest leaders that are required to run large scale projects of complex systems. Voting produces the worst and dumbest leaders for large scale projects. It is time to move on.
I guess the first thing I want to say here is to set expectations. The US government in its current form is going to crumble under the weight of complexity being lead by the worst idiots among us in both Congress and as President. Our pandemic response expectations then should be set accordingly. Whatever solution any of them come up with will be stupid and the worst corruption. Future response will be even worse as complexity increases.
If we can't vote the best and the brightest into office that are needed to run the the US government then what? There have been many proposals, all of them in science fiction.
I grew up reading science-fiction. Of course as a kid I assumed everyone was reading the same thing as I was. I was confused by what I was seeing in society around me as I grew older because our politics are so juvenile compared to future governments being proposed as new experiments by science fiction writers.
So how do we get the best and brightest according to science fiction? Again these are just hypothesis because none of them have been tried in the real world.
Far and away the most popular solution for managing complex governing is AI, or artificial intelligence. Why? Because computers have more memory and more processing power than any one human. If AI were our government today managing the pandemic then we would feed all the data into that AI and then it would spit out the plan for minimizing death count. We would then implement that plan.
The upside to this is that in fact one day soon a computer will the best and brightest at making large scale project decisions.
What are the downsides?
First off, people won't trust the computer. People will resent the computer. A government is inherently a feedback loop meaning that if people don't trust government then the project will fail simply for the lack of trust. Trust is one variable a computer cannot solve for.
Second is that computers have no empathy. A computer may indeed crank out a solution that is weighted heavily against one demographic like the elderly. Of course one can keep putting new constraints on the program to avoid such outcomes but ultimately that starts converging onto a human solution masquerading as an AI solution.
Computers are also prone to what we call in the industry simply, "garbage in, garbage out", or GIGO. The computer has to get its data from somewhere. That somewhere is humans who can indirectly program the computer with GIGO in order to favor a solution and game the system via input data.
There are many entertainment programs with AI running the world. One of the better representations of this dilemma of humans and AI is on Star Trek The Next Generation and Commander Data's learning empathy. A simpler representation is the movie, "War Games", where the global thermal nuclear war simulation is accidentally plugged into real systems.
Computers running the world are rampant in science fiction writing, television and in movies.
Computers destroying the world are rampant as with the Terminator series of movies where the AI becomes sentient and decides the best approach to life is to kill all humans.
Or we have "Matrix" series of movies where humans become the consciousness device for AI and these human-AI hybrids take over the world.
So should we trust computers to run the word? First off, everything above is hypothetical and never tested. This means we don't know. We have to form a hypothesis and conduct and experiment. If we are going to go down this path of trusting AI then we must do so with caution. Baby steps.
However we can do a much better job of utilizing our AI we have today than we are. For example, there are no AI pandemic simulations today the encompass both economic and disease scenarios. There are no AI simulations to give us even a hint at balancing shutting down economies with herd immunity. We can certainly start down that path.
Can we trust AI with final decions? We don't know. We don't really know how much we can trust AI because we haven't tried yet at the large scale.
Probably the best thought experiment in science fiction regarding genetic engineering is the Dune series of books by Frank Herbert. Genetic engineering is easily as ubiquitous in science fiction for future governing as computers are.
One warning I think worth mentioning here is that monarchy is expected to make a comeback due to genetic engineering.
Initially genetic engineering is going to be expensive and exclusive to the rich. The rich will artificiality make themselves the best and the brightest. The rich will then promote monarchy as the optimal way to mange complexity by an elite group of inbred genetic superiority. Most science fiction writers predict this is going to be a difficult argument to beat back except with AI.
One of my favorite books on this topic is from 1969 in the book, "Lord of Light", by Roger Zelazny. In that book Zelazny predicts that there will be factions within the genetic elite. One faction will stop genetic engineering from spreading within humanity in general and leave the rest of humanity to natural genetic selection. This will be the ruling faction. The resistance will wage a war of what Zelazny coined as "accelerationism", which is the right for all people to have access to genetic engineering.
So there is a moral here. Be careful what you wish for with clamoring for meritocracy going forward. Specifically right now there are many people recommending that our Representatives and the President be subject to testing much like a college exam. However, we are in a short window of time before genetic engineering comes online. Further, Orson Scott Card in the book "Ender's Game" posits there will be cheating where people will get chordical implants with direct AI interface to their brain. These people will be able to cheat and give the appearance of meritocracy.
Can we trust genetic engineering? Again, we don't know cause we have no data.
The Matrix movies are a form of cybernetics where AI uses human consciousness to generate AI consciousness as a hive mind. This is similar to the Borg in Star Trek. To me this is just another form of AI where the humans are enslaved.
Cybernetics for this discussion is more along the lines of the TV show, "Altered Carbon" where humans are in control of AI. The rich use cloning and cybernetics to rule. However, there is no hive mind like with the Borg in the Matrix. Human egos still abound. There is no monarchy either although there are rich families that run the show. Orson Scott Card's method cheating using a chordical implant to give the appearance of natural intelligence is also cybernetics.
Can we trust cloning and cybernetics? Again, we don't know because we have no data.
Indefinite lifespans is probably the most common theme in science fiction albeit within the same body or multiple bodies. To be honest I never really read much where longevity itself was a solution for large scale project governing. This is because the technology level for longevity is synonymous with genetic engineering that allows for improving intelligence. I mean why limit yourself to just longevity? Now longevity does factor into current and future life-boat ethics, for sure. But longevity in and of itself does not make an argument for better government.
We can dismiss longevity.
Those are our possibilities for managing the growing complexity of governing: computers, genetic engineering, and cloning with cybernetics. Our problem is that we have no data to analyze yet they are all soon to come. Creating any new governing solution now that does not take these technologies into account is short-sighted. All of these options for complexity governing are going to become available in the not to distant future.
If we just let things play out without change using today's government then the most likely scenario in my opinion is a genetic engineering monarchy assisted by AI. The question is will genetic engineering monarchy assisted by AI result in tyranny or freedom for the masses? We have no experience and no data on the outcome of genetic engineered people running government so any conclusions are impossible.
However, based upon nature we can observe where the tensions lie for any future governing to deal with. Someone once stated that every person has the right to risk their own life in order to save it. Many philosophers have posited what Charles Dickens stated as "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." Frank Herbert extrapolated that the optimal path to maximal tyranny is to encourage the largest population possible so as to flatten freedom in order to supply the needs of the many. In other words more overall needs restricts personal freedom. In other words the less the population the more freedom. There exists some balance of population size and optimal freedom that defeats the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few or the one.
The problem with AI running the world is that it cannot balance population size with optimal freedom because what people see as freedom changes in real time. This is know as the butterfly effect where a small change in the system will impact the entire system. Every new person born into a system of optimal freedom will reconfigure the freedom parameters. The best theoretical future AI cannot keep up with so many variables unless it severely restricts population size. In fact the limit of small population size of such calculus is expressed in the Terminator movies where the optimal solution is to just kill everyone and freedom is infinite because there are no humans.
The lesson from science fiction is that there is no optimal best and brightest solution; just good and bright because ever changing freedom choices will always raise and lower freedom levels simultaneously and the choice of who gets the more freedom is arbitrary. Or in other words the individual choice has precedent sometimes over overall governing choice. When and where is arbitrary. That arbitrariness is best left to humans and not computers.
Future government then must be a large project system that enables individual choice that puts the needs of the one or the few over the many in some managed fashion. This observation was stated in a Star Trek movie the argument was simply an emotional appeal and not reasoned as just presented.
The upshot is here that government will always and forever more be experimental. The experiment will always be to provide each generation with as many governing knobs, buttons, and whistles as possible for selecting new forms of governing. What we need is a permanent massive experimental system of governing that is always changing and not fixed like with constitutions as we have today. This is why I am an aconstitutionist in general and not just with regards to the US Constitution.
One of these sets of governing knobs, buttons, and whistles will always include Democracy. Or any other form of historical government, including theocracy. Okay this is confusing. Think of it this way. The choice of government is government. So how do we make sense of all this? Sense making is accomplished using empirical data, the same as with any experiment. Thus it is that Irreni World Scale is a refereeing system and not a rule of law system.
In order to continue this discussion of a solution to our large scale projects like a pandemic response then I need to take a moment and explain Irreni World Scale and how it solves the problem.
All experiments require a hypothesis. Irreni enforces that a new government hypothesis cannot on its face claim to make things more tyrannical or worse off for existing people. In other words, in the future one can start any new kind of theocracy or authoritarianism government as long as the hypothesis on its face will seemingly produce better quality of life for people. The hypothesis has to make sense and judging that hypothesis is part of the refereeing system. If someone wants to propose dictatorship as being best then they just have to convince the Irreni refereeing board the hypothesis has merit. If so then an experiment can commence. The experiment hypothesis is a constitution. However, its scale is small and its existence is subject to empirical proof of efficacy and if there is no efficacy then the constitution is scrubbed like any failed experiment. Today constitutions are permanent.
In addition to empirical results then Irreni also has one other anti-tyranny design feature: scale. One must prove that any new government design works on a small scale of thirty people first. The smallest from of government in Irreni is also the starting point for any new government. It is called the MGO or micro-modular governing organization. This small scale approach prohibits starting new government types using populations larger than thirty. Theoretically there may well exist governments that can only be realized by starting them at some larger population like say a billion people. But realize the prime directive of any large scale governing project is to enable individual choice that puts the needs of the one or the few over the many at times. This is inherently antagonistic to experiments that start with large populations. MGOs in Irreni are sovereign, not the governments built from the smaller blocks. The smallest government in Irreni has final authority. A single individual can petition their MGO. This MGO can then to decide to remove itself from any larger governing body. This is how a single individual can change even the largest scale project.
Irreni is large scale government that is realized through measuring empirical data against stated objectives and not human rights. In Irreni a group of people can offer to sacrifice their human rights as a matter of course. Human rights are just a standard for refereeing. Today human rights are naive when it comes to freedom. For example the right to free speech is limited in many ways. We limit advertising for child entertainment in order to protect children from being influenced into trying addictive substances like alcohol or tobacco. Therefore when we watch child entertainment along with our kids than our right to free speech to see alcohol and tobacco ads is also restricted. Human rights today are pretend absolute. We actually referee them. However the formal system treats human rights as absolutes first and refereeing them is an unreasonably high bar.
The abortion right is probably the one topic where the concept of an absolute human right is exposed as a flawed governing design. The biological point where impregnation goes from egg to person is indeterminate. We'll never know. The pro-life argument is that it is better safe than sorry and then to assume the fertilized egg is a person. However, after fifty years of caterwauling about this the pro-life movement hasn't changes hearts and minds of those who don't agree with them. It is safe to say this will never happen. The human right to life from the pro-life perspective is failed and always will be. Irreni is not designed to consider absolute human rights. Irreni is a refereeing system. There are no absolute rights. Instead people vote and otherwise set standards for empirical analysis of improving life. Each day in an Irreni system the empirical data of overall quality of life is collected for everyone. If some MGO quality of life goes down based upon some set standard of overall quality then MGO groups are disbanded per refereeing guidelines. In the Irreni future the pro-life people will then need to make the case to a population at large to weigh abortion as a factor. The weight of abortion as a part of overall quality of life is determined by everyone participating in the overall standard.
You will have the capability in Irreni World Scale to establish any form of government you choose with your MGO providing your constitution for that MGO isn't apparently tyrannical. Constitutions and voting do work on a small scale. They do not work for large scale projects. Your immediate government of the MGO can be Democracy.
Irreni's design is inherently side-by-side and not top-down with other governments. MGOs can be installed side-by-side with any government today. The starting point is to start collecting empirical data and to set standards for defining refereeing guidelines of overall quality of life based on the empirical data.
This means that Irreni can exist as ad addition to any existing governing body.
That's all you need to know about Irreni so as to make the argument improving for large scale projects like a pandemic response.
How do we get the best and brightest to run our ever increasingly complex society without running into the pitfalls of genetic engineering, AI, cloning, or cybernetics? Or better stated, how do we get the best and brightest to run our ever increasingly complex society by taking advantage of the best that genetic engineering, AI, cloning and cybernetics have to offer?
First we have no data on future technology like we have no data right now on the impact of a government shutdown today. We need to collect data.
We need experiments then. To conduct experiments we need a lab. That lab will then collect the data. We need genetic engineering labs, AI labs, cloning labs, and cybernetic labs. I'm not talking labs for developing the technology. I'm talking labs for using the technology to help us govern and make the best and brightest decisions for governing complex systems.
Instant gratification is not going to happen. In fact this is going to be a long hard slog. It has to be. Why? Because humans have inherently different wants and needs that are ever changing. We are shooting a moving target. Unifying those collective wants and needs into a coherent governing solution must be a long hard slog.
What we need then is a meta-government. A meta-government of experimental governments. Further this government of experimental governments is permanent because people's wants and needs are ever changing and that includes the new born of every tomorrow. We must have this meta-government if we do not want fixed governments like we have today that target ideal population sizes mapped to Earth's fixed resources. If that happens then tyranny and oppression is ensured because winners and losers as to who has access to resources will be the prerogative of the rulers.
Irreni World Scale is a government that continually increases the capacity to have the best and the brightest make governing decisions all the while optimizing freedom of the individual. Irreni achieves this by analyzing empirical data and measuring overall quality of life for everyone on planet Earth. In other words we don't pick a fixed who or how that is needed to realize best and brightest decisions. Instead governing for large scale projects using Irreni relies on empirical data from many competing experiments. We answer the question of are you actually realizing better and brighter solutions every day. We are free to choose to always change.
Irreni World Scale is designed to start today. Irreni is designed to start with just an initial thirty people. Over time as more people join the Irreni World Scale system then the more effective Irreni World Scale system will become. Since Irreni World Scale is an experimental empirical system that measures overall quality then it is the large scale project solution to our pandemic problems today.
This is going to take time. The timeline for full US adoption of Irreni is two-hundred years. Two-hundred years is the earliest I can see Irreni replacing the US Constitution and our current States and local government. In the meantime we must expect gradual improvements. We cannot expect dramatic improvements in handling future large scale pandemic projects precisely because we a.) don't have the best and brightest governing today and b.) we don't know how to improve best and brightest governing. We need to experiment. We need to have a meta-government like Irreni that fosters permanent ongoing governing experiments that start at a small scale and then build out from there.
This has been your pandemic help for today. Large scale projects do not lend themselves to simple solutions. Simple solutions do not exist for complex problems with a large number of variables. Permanent experiments that scale from small to large in a meta-governing system like Irreni is needed.
Join an MGO today!
You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
Large Scale Projects
My help today in this time of pandemic is to educate about large scale projects. An pandemic response is a large scale project. The US government with three-hundred million people is a large scale project.
How should we think about these things?
Immediate life-and-death trade-offs are needed in a pandemic. Ongoing life-and-death trade-offs are ever present in governing. My favorite thought exercise for life-and-death scenarios is life-boat ethics. Life boat ethics is a thought experiment similar to the now popular trolley car experiment. I don't like the trolley car version because only one person is involved. In a life boat there only enough resources for say one person on the life boat and then three people involved need to come to a decision where in the trolley scenario only a single person is making the decision. Having multiple people discuss the decision is our pandemic reality today.
Plus with life-boat ethics you get jokes like this one. Bill Clinton, the Pope, and Mayor Daly of Chicago are all on a life boat with only enough water for one person to survive until help arrives. So how to decide? They all agree to take a vote. So they get out pen and paper and write down their votes. Bill Clinton goes first in revealing his vote. Bill voted for himself. The Pope goes, "tsk, tsk, why would you do that?" Bill Clinton says, "As the President of the United States I'm the leader of the free world so it is most important I survive." The Pope's up next. He turns over his vote and he also cast a vote for himself. Bill Clinton goes, "tsk, tsk, what's up with that?" The Pope says, "I'm God's chosen emissary on earth and therefore I should survive." So it looks like it is going to be a stalemate unless Mayor Daly voted for one of the other two. Everyone stares at each other quite some time. After which Mayor Daly smiles, hops up, flips his vote over and there are over three-hundred marks and he says, "I voted for myself and so did all the dead people in Chicago, I win!"
Life Boat Ethics Today
So what life-boat ethics are we being inundated with today?
- Herd immunity: This is the do nothing approach. Just let people die and build up herd immunity. The fundamental flaw with this is that far more people will die of things not coronavirus due to hospitals being overwhelmed. This is what is playing out in Italy. It is not just the people with the coronavirus that die, it is also people who would otherwise get treatment but cannot because the hospital is overwhelmed treating coronavirus victims.
- Flatten the curve: This is the herd immunity strategy but revised to flatten the curve of new cases so that hospitals do not get overwhelmed. The fundamental flaw with this is that we have no idea how many people are going to die because of shutting down the economy. Trump is claiming without evidence that keeping the economy shut down will result in more deaths than our current strategy. The fact is we have no historical data on deaths due to shutting down the economy in order to make any claim. We don't know.
- Hybrid of herd and flatten: Reopen the economy earlier than curve-flattening projections recommend. We've flattened the curve somewhat but we are just going to run with herd immunity now. The fundamental flaw with this approach is it is straight up gambling. Given Trump's casinos I can understand why he thinks gambling is okay. I'm not a gambler. I'm horrified with this solution. We have no idea how many people are going to die because of the shutdown or who and how to stop that from happening. Not only is this risky, but the risk amount itself is unknown. However, we do know more deaths will happen due to hospital capacity by jumping the gun on flattening the curve.
Of course life-boat ethics is about more than just body count as both the Mayor Daly joke relates and as the trolley-car dilemma specifies. Are women and children saved first? There are people suggesting that since the highest risk is to the elderly then a herd immunity strategy is acceptable. Unnh, no. Ethics 101. A civilization is best judged by its capacity to take of the least among them. Any society that does not take of the elderly, the weak, the young, and the least among them is uncivilized. People who want to sacrifice the elderly are uncivilized.
One other reason I prefer life-boat ethics over trolley ethics is the set of rich traditions such as women and children first. The captain always goes down with the ship. Never leave a soldier behind. Back in the day prior to the American Civil War then the Generals of an army rode in the front line. Ethics. Soldiers also picked their officers. The point here is that the person making the decisions about who gets to live and die should be first in line to die. One of my favorite George Washington stories is from when he served as a British Officer. In one battle with the native Americans he was the only officer to survive. All the others were killed. One account of the battle retold the battle as Washington leading the charge. Washington was six-feet tall. In that era six-feet was noticeably taller. As the biggest and richest guy then Washington also had the biggest horse. Washington lead the charge into battle as the easiest target to hit and yet was the only one to survive. That's life boat ethics. Washington continued to lead the charge into battle even during the Revolutionary War until finally about half way through the war his officers convinced him to stay behind. Think about it. The iconic painting of Washington on a boat in the Delaware river is not just imagination. Washington probably was on the lead boat, standing up, making an easy target of himself.
Can you imagine Washington as President today being informed that the elderly were the most at risk of dying if we opened the economy early and Washington going, "yeah let's do that?"
Again, one thing I think most of us can agree upon is that one measure of our worth is how well we take care of the least among us and therefore our life-boat ethics should target an unqualified life-and-death count. Of course minimizing death counts requires specific remedies for specific demographics like the elderly. Being fair about resources is unethical.
So now that we have dispensed with life-boat ethics then let's talk about solutions.
Solutions
Now what? Well, let's the try the obvious. Put your best people on it. The best and the brightest. Let them ponder the problem and hopefully they can provide a best case scenario. We trust the experts to realize the best solution a society can offer.
But do we?
Let's take a quick detour down memory lane about "the best and brightest."
I am an aconstitutionist. I do not believe in constitutional government as the best solution. If you think being a atheist is bad, try being an aconstitutionist. I am an atheist and an aconstitutionist for the same reason: lack of evidence.
In our case here I'm specifically referring to "the best and the brightest" hypothesis embedded in the US Constitution. The meritocracy claim was initially made by Thomas Paine. Paine argued that governing is a large scale project and required the best and brightest. He argued that governing is complicated and you need your best person on it. Paine further went on to ridicule monarchy as the worst and the dumbest. Not the least of his arguments was monarchy reduced mental capability due to inbreeding.
Voting on a large scale then was a hypothesis of the best and brightest being relative to monarchy. Still though even back then they didn't trust the average voter completely. This is why the President was chosen by the Congress and not by popular vote.
The US Constitution is an abysmal failure and collosal trash on so many levels but you only need one reason to dispatch with it completely. Voting does not give us the best and brightest. Voting gives us the worst and the dumbest. The worst can be thought of as the most corrupt.
Here's the kicker. We've known this for over one hundred years.
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” ― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
The experiment failed. The experiment of constitutional government has failed. The hypothesis of meritocracy by voting has failed. We are not electing representatives to either Congress or the White House who are the best and brightest. We are electing the worst and dumbest. We are the electing the most corrupt. Democracy is done. Stick a fork in it.
This failure is our demise today regarding the coronavirus. We are literally running the monkey experiment. The monkey experiment is when you take a monkey and you give the monkey a typewriter. You have the monkey start typing until the monkey types the collected works of William Shakespeare. Of course that's never going to happen. And so it is that the political solution for a pandemic is never going to happen in our Democracy today. We don't have the best and brightest.
John Oliver actually joked about this as a Wombat flying an airplane.
But it is not just the President.
Mark Twain noted, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
Albert Einstein observed that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We keep electing the worst and dumbest expecting them to execute as the best and brightest.
We Americans are insane. We expect each election to vote in the best and brightest of the choices we are offered when in fact our choices are not the lesser of two evils, but rather the lesser of the two dumbest.
A wombat can't fly an airplane. A monkey cannot type William Shakespeare. The worst and dumbest cannot run a large scale project created by the best and brightest.
Our world is getting better and brighter every day by technology created by the smartest people society has. Our politics is being run by the dumbest and they are getting dumber.
This is why I am an aconstitutionist. Voting is fundamental to Democracy. Remove voting and you have no Democracy.
The risk of having the worst and dumbest running the world goes up every day as population increases and technology increases. The complexity of the world is increasing daily. The mistakes made by the dumbest and the worst will cost us more and more each year and we are seeing this play out in this pandemic.
We are in an impossible situation created by voting not being a meritocracy. We are asking dumb people to do the smartest thing.
How did we get here?
Did the founders see this coming? Provide a solution?
Well, the originators of the US Constitution did see some inherent flaws that were passed anyway. Adams opined, "Whoa be the day the voters realize they can vote themselves money." Because of this flaw then Adams predicated the US Constitution experiment would only last one twenty years. Jefferson saw the mountain of centuries of laws piling up in England as the tyranny of the dead over the living. Because of this Jefferson proposed an amendment to have each generation write its own constitution. However, none of them anticipated that the meritocracy hypothesis of voting would fail. Hamilton wanted a monarchy for President but his reasons for advocating for this were purely political and not based on any evidence that voting was inferior.
This essay is entitled, "Large Scale Projects". Voting does work at smaller scales. This is why voting was chosen initially because it worked at the small scale of colonies. At small scales on the order of one-hundred to say a thousand people then voting does have some validity with respect to being a meritocracy. Where the line of population size where voting breaks down is not the point of this essay, but rather this essay simply points out that for large scale projects voting does not result in the best and brightest leaders that are required to run large scale projects of complex systems. Voting produces the worst and dumbest leaders for large scale projects. It is time to move on.
I guess the first thing I want to say here is to set expectations. The US government in its current form is going to crumble under the weight of complexity being lead by the worst idiots among us in both Congress and as President. Our pandemic response expectations then should be set accordingly. Whatever solution any of them come up with will be stupid and the worst corruption. Future response will be even worse as complexity increases.
If we can't vote the best and the brightest into office that are needed to run the the US government then what? There have been many proposals, all of them in science fiction.
I grew up reading science-fiction. Of course as a kid I assumed everyone was reading the same thing as I was. I was confused by what I was seeing in society around me as I grew older because our politics are so juvenile compared to future governments being proposed as new experiments by science fiction writers.
So how do we get the best and brightest according to science fiction? Again these are just hypothesis because none of them have been tried in the real world.
Computers
Far and away the most popular solution for managing complex governing is AI, or artificial intelligence. Why? Because computers have more memory and more processing power than any one human. If AI were our government today managing the pandemic then we would feed all the data into that AI and then it would spit out the plan for minimizing death count. We would then implement that plan.
The upside to this is that in fact one day soon a computer will the best and brightest at making large scale project decisions.
What are the downsides?
First off, people won't trust the computer. People will resent the computer. A government is inherently a feedback loop meaning that if people don't trust government then the project will fail simply for the lack of trust. Trust is one variable a computer cannot solve for.
Second is that computers have no empathy. A computer may indeed crank out a solution that is weighted heavily against one demographic like the elderly. Of course one can keep putting new constraints on the program to avoid such outcomes but ultimately that starts converging onto a human solution masquerading as an AI solution.
Computers are also prone to what we call in the industry simply, "garbage in, garbage out", or GIGO. The computer has to get its data from somewhere. That somewhere is humans who can indirectly program the computer with GIGO in order to favor a solution and game the system via input data.
There are many entertainment programs with AI running the world. One of the better representations of this dilemma of humans and AI is on Star Trek The Next Generation and Commander Data's learning empathy. A simpler representation is the movie, "War Games", where the global thermal nuclear war simulation is accidentally plugged into real systems.
Computers running the world are rampant in science fiction writing, television and in movies.
Computers destroying the world are rampant as with the Terminator series of movies where the AI becomes sentient and decides the best approach to life is to kill all humans.
Or we have "Matrix" series of movies where humans become the consciousness device for AI and these human-AI hybrids take over the world.
So should we trust computers to run the word? First off, everything above is hypothetical and never tested. This means we don't know. We have to form a hypothesis and conduct and experiment. If we are going to go down this path of trusting AI then we must do so with caution. Baby steps.
However we can do a much better job of utilizing our AI we have today than we are. For example, there are no AI pandemic simulations today the encompass both economic and disease scenarios. There are no AI simulations to give us even a hint at balancing shutting down economies with herd immunity. We can certainly start down that path.
Can we trust AI with final decions? We don't know. We don't really know how much we can trust AI because we haven't tried yet at the large scale.
Genetic Engineering
Probably the best thought experiment in science fiction regarding genetic engineering is the Dune series of books by Frank Herbert. Genetic engineering is easily as ubiquitous in science fiction for future governing as computers are.
One warning I think worth mentioning here is that monarchy is expected to make a comeback due to genetic engineering.
Initially genetic engineering is going to be expensive and exclusive to the rich. The rich will artificiality make themselves the best and the brightest. The rich will then promote monarchy as the optimal way to mange complexity by an elite group of inbred genetic superiority. Most science fiction writers predict this is going to be a difficult argument to beat back except with AI.
One of my favorite books on this topic is from 1969 in the book, "Lord of Light", by Roger Zelazny. In that book Zelazny predicts that there will be factions within the genetic elite. One faction will stop genetic engineering from spreading within humanity in general and leave the rest of humanity to natural genetic selection. This will be the ruling faction. The resistance will wage a war of what Zelazny coined as "accelerationism", which is the right for all people to have access to genetic engineering.
So there is a moral here. Be careful what you wish for with clamoring for meritocracy going forward. Specifically right now there are many people recommending that our Representatives and the President be subject to testing much like a college exam. However, we are in a short window of time before genetic engineering comes online. Further, Orson Scott Card in the book "Ender's Game" posits there will be cheating where people will get chordical implants with direct AI interface to their brain. These people will be able to cheat and give the appearance of meritocracy.
Can we trust genetic engineering? Again, we don't know cause we have no data.
Cloning & Cybernetics
The Matrix movies are a form of cybernetics where AI uses human consciousness to generate AI consciousness as a hive mind. This is similar to the Borg in Star Trek. To me this is just another form of AI where the humans are enslaved.
Cybernetics for this discussion is more along the lines of the TV show, "Altered Carbon" where humans are in control of AI. The rich use cloning and cybernetics to rule. However, there is no hive mind like with the Borg in the Matrix. Human egos still abound. There is no monarchy either although there are rich families that run the show. Orson Scott Card's method cheating using a chordical implant to give the appearance of natural intelligence is also cybernetics.
Can we trust cloning and cybernetics? Again, we don't know because we have no data.
Longevity
Indefinite lifespans is probably the most common theme in science fiction albeit within the same body or multiple bodies. To be honest I never really read much where longevity itself was a solution for large scale project governing. This is because the technology level for longevity is synonymous with genetic engineering that allows for improving intelligence. I mean why limit yourself to just longevity? Now longevity does factor into current and future life-boat ethics, for sure. But longevity in and of itself does not make an argument for better government.
We can dismiss longevity.
Analysis
Those are our possibilities for managing the growing complexity of governing: computers, genetic engineering, and cloning with cybernetics. Our problem is that we have no data to analyze yet they are all soon to come. Creating any new governing solution now that does not take these technologies into account is short-sighted. All of these options for complexity governing are going to become available in the not to distant future.
If we just let things play out without change using today's government then the most likely scenario in my opinion is a genetic engineering monarchy assisted by AI. The question is will genetic engineering monarchy assisted by AI result in tyranny or freedom for the masses? We have no experience and no data on the outcome of genetic engineered people running government so any conclusions are impossible.
However, based upon nature we can observe where the tensions lie for any future governing to deal with. Someone once stated that every person has the right to risk their own life in order to save it. Many philosophers have posited what Charles Dickens stated as "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." Frank Herbert extrapolated that the optimal path to maximal tyranny is to encourage the largest population possible so as to flatten freedom in order to supply the needs of the many. In other words more overall needs restricts personal freedom. In other words the less the population the more freedom. There exists some balance of population size and optimal freedom that defeats the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few or the one.
The problem with AI running the world is that it cannot balance population size with optimal freedom because what people see as freedom changes in real time. This is know as the butterfly effect where a small change in the system will impact the entire system. Every new person born into a system of optimal freedom will reconfigure the freedom parameters. The best theoretical future AI cannot keep up with so many variables unless it severely restricts population size. In fact the limit of small population size of such calculus is expressed in the Terminator movies where the optimal solution is to just kill everyone and freedom is infinite because there are no humans.
The lesson from science fiction is that there is no optimal best and brightest solution; just good and bright because ever changing freedom choices will always raise and lower freedom levels simultaneously and the choice of who gets the more freedom is arbitrary. Or in other words the individual choice has precedent sometimes over overall governing choice. When and where is arbitrary. That arbitrariness is best left to humans and not computers.
Future government then must be a large project system that enables individual choice that puts the needs of the one or the few over the many in some managed fashion. This observation was stated in a Star Trek movie the argument was simply an emotional appeal and not reasoned as just presented.
Irerni World Scale
The upshot is here that government will always and forever more be experimental. The experiment will always be to provide each generation with as many governing knobs, buttons, and whistles as possible for selecting new forms of governing. What we need is a permanent massive experimental system of governing that is always changing and not fixed like with constitutions as we have today. This is why I am an aconstitutionist in general and not just with regards to the US Constitution.
One of these sets of governing knobs, buttons, and whistles will always include Democracy. Or any other form of historical government, including theocracy. Okay this is confusing. Think of it this way. The choice of government is government. So how do we make sense of all this? Sense making is accomplished using empirical data, the same as with any experiment. Thus it is that Irreni World Scale is a refereeing system and not a rule of law system.
In order to continue this discussion of a solution to our large scale projects like a pandemic response then I need to take a moment and explain Irreni World Scale and how it solves the problem.
All experiments require a hypothesis. Irreni enforces that a new government hypothesis cannot on its face claim to make things more tyrannical or worse off for existing people. In other words, in the future one can start any new kind of theocracy or authoritarianism government as long as the hypothesis on its face will seemingly produce better quality of life for people. The hypothesis has to make sense and judging that hypothesis is part of the refereeing system. If someone wants to propose dictatorship as being best then they just have to convince the Irreni refereeing board the hypothesis has merit. If so then an experiment can commence. The experiment hypothesis is a constitution. However, its scale is small and its existence is subject to empirical proof of efficacy and if there is no efficacy then the constitution is scrubbed like any failed experiment. Today constitutions are permanent.
In addition to empirical results then Irreni also has one other anti-tyranny design feature: scale. One must prove that any new government design works on a small scale of thirty people first. The smallest from of government in Irreni is also the starting point for any new government. It is called the MGO or micro-modular governing organization. This small scale approach prohibits starting new government types using populations larger than thirty. Theoretically there may well exist governments that can only be realized by starting them at some larger population like say a billion people. But realize the prime directive of any large scale governing project is to enable individual choice that puts the needs of the one or the few over the many at times. This is inherently antagonistic to experiments that start with large populations. MGOs in Irreni are sovereign, not the governments built from the smaller blocks. The smallest government in Irreni has final authority. A single individual can petition their MGO. This MGO can then to decide to remove itself from any larger governing body. This is how a single individual can change even the largest scale project.
Irreni is large scale government that is realized through measuring empirical data against stated objectives and not human rights. In Irreni a group of people can offer to sacrifice their human rights as a matter of course. Human rights are just a standard for refereeing. Today human rights are naive when it comes to freedom. For example the right to free speech is limited in many ways. We limit advertising for child entertainment in order to protect children from being influenced into trying addictive substances like alcohol or tobacco. Therefore when we watch child entertainment along with our kids than our right to free speech to see alcohol and tobacco ads is also restricted. Human rights today are pretend absolute. We actually referee them. However the formal system treats human rights as absolutes first and refereeing them is an unreasonably high bar.
The abortion right is probably the one topic where the concept of an absolute human right is exposed as a flawed governing design. The biological point where impregnation goes from egg to person is indeterminate. We'll never know. The pro-life argument is that it is better safe than sorry and then to assume the fertilized egg is a person. However, after fifty years of caterwauling about this the pro-life movement hasn't changes hearts and minds of those who don't agree with them. It is safe to say this will never happen. The human right to life from the pro-life perspective is failed and always will be. Irreni is not designed to consider absolute human rights. Irreni is a refereeing system. There are no absolute rights. Instead people vote and otherwise set standards for empirical analysis of improving life. Each day in an Irreni system the empirical data of overall quality of life is collected for everyone. If some MGO quality of life goes down based upon some set standard of overall quality then MGO groups are disbanded per refereeing guidelines. In the Irreni future the pro-life people will then need to make the case to a population at large to weigh abortion as a factor. The weight of abortion as a part of overall quality of life is determined by everyone participating in the overall standard.
You will have the capability in Irreni World Scale to establish any form of government you choose with your MGO providing your constitution for that MGO isn't apparently tyrannical. Constitutions and voting do work on a small scale. They do not work for large scale projects. Your immediate government of the MGO can be Democracy.
Irreni's design is inherently side-by-side and not top-down with other governments. MGOs can be installed side-by-side with any government today. The starting point is to start collecting empirical data and to set standards for defining refereeing guidelines of overall quality of life based on the empirical data.
This means that Irreni can exist as ad addition to any existing governing body.
That's all you need to know about Irreni so as to make the argument improving for large scale projects like a pandemic response.
Best And Brightest Solution For Increasing Complexity
How do we get the best and brightest to run our ever increasingly complex society without running into the pitfalls of genetic engineering, AI, cloning, or cybernetics? Or better stated, how do we get the best and brightest to run our ever increasingly complex society by taking advantage of the best that genetic engineering, AI, cloning and cybernetics have to offer?
First we have no data on future technology like we have no data right now on the impact of a government shutdown today. We need to collect data.
We need experiments then. To conduct experiments we need a lab. That lab will then collect the data. We need genetic engineering labs, AI labs, cloning labs, and cybernetic labs. I'm not talking labs for developing the technology. I'm talking labs for using the technology to help us govern and make the best and brightest decisions for governing complex systems.
Instant gratification is not going to happen. In fact this is going to be a long hard slog. It has to be. Why? Because humans have inherently different wants and needs that are ever changing. We are shooting a moving target. Unifying those collective wants and needs into a coherent governing solution must be a long hard slog.
What we need then is a meta-government. A meta-government of experimental governments. Further this government of experimental governments is permanent because people's wants and needs are ever changing and that includes the new born of every tomorrow. We must have this meta-government if we do not want fixed governments like we have today that target ideal population sizes mapped to Earth's fixed resources. If that happens then tyranny and oppression is ensured because winners and losers as to who has access to resources will be the prerogative of the rulers.
Irreni World Scale is a government that continually increases the capacity to have the best and the brightest make governing decisions all the while optimizing freedom of the individual. Irreni achieves this by analyzing empirical data and measuring overall quality of life for everyone on planet Earth. In other words we don't pick a fixed who or how that is needed to realize best and brightest decisions. Instead governing for large scale projects using Irreni relies on empirical data from many competing experiments. We answer the question of are you actually realizing better and brighter solutions every day. We are free to choose to always change.
Irreni World Scale is designed to start today. Irreni is designed to start with just an initial thirty people. Over time as more people join the Irreni World Scale system then the more effective Irreni World Scale system will become. Since Irreni World Scale is an experimental empirical system that measures overall quality then it is the large scale project solution to our pandemic problems today.
This is going to take time. The timeline for full US adoption of Irreni is two-hundred years. Two-hundred years is the earliest I can see Irreni replacing the US Constitution and our current States and local government. In the meantime we must expect gradual improvements. We cannot expect dramatic improvements in handling future large scale pandemic projects precisely because we a.) don't have the best and brightest governing today and b.) we don't know how to improve best and brightest governing. We need to experiment. We need to have a meta-government like Irreni that fosters permanent ongoing governing experiments that start at a small scale and then build out from there.
This has been your pandemic help for today. Large scale projects do not lend themselves to simple solutions. Simple solutions do not exist for complex problems with a large number of variables. Permanent experiments that scale from small to large in a meta-governing system like Irreni is needed.
Join an MGO today!
You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:
https://irreni.blogspot.com/p/join.html
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
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