The rest of the posts made 9/15/10 to the No Bad Memes blog. This is here for archival and research purposes.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Idearchy - the optimum choice for any meritocratic, and pragmatic, society
In an ideal society, who should we give authority to? Why should checking and balancing exist if "the people" possess the capacity to ruin society with errs in judgment or poor ideas?
The answer to this is simple: based on both hard logic and empirical observation, we pragmatically formulate models of ideals which we rigorously test -- not for rightness or wrongness, but for usefulness, as in components of a system. Then, after peer reviewing the results while continually checking for superior alternatives, we adopt these ideals for implementation by default. In essence, society will be ruled not by elites, not by no one, and not even by everyone, but by ideas. This, if we are to label it with a name at all, is idearchy. Anarchy strips everyone, especially government elites, of power; omniarchy grants everyone power; idearchy grants power to logic and logic alone.
Testing ideas shifts our focus away from agents. If I agree with a Christian that sadistic torture is unacceptable, am I now a Christian? Of course not. Likewise, just because a Christian is against sadistic torture does not imply that he or she would make a good leader. We're all subject to individual faults, so instead of inefficiently taking any one of us as a bundle of ideas, why not assess the ideas individually, and let them 'rule' us through unbiased, rigorous testing and peer review? No idea should ever be coupled to another simply because it runs on the same hardware.
Posted by Leaving Society at 10:11 PM No comments:
Logical action is logical action -- period
If morality, as pointed out in my original outlining of my modus operandi, is essentially superstition, then words like 'ethics' are archaic. Logically determined default actions encompass a variety of different facets of life, so distinguishing between one type and an 'ethical' type seems a waste of time -- either an action is logically founded, or it isn't.
Posted by Leaving Society at 9:58 PM No comments:
Some bad spoils the whole
Heed the post prior to this one for a more elaborate and complete argument against life as an 'intelligent' idea, as it contains some of the more poignant points on this topic. If you're still hung up on the existence of subjective 'good' alongside subjective 'bad,' though, and perceive 'good' to be enough of a justification for life, then consider the following analogy.
You encounter a belief system consisting of four core tenets. Three of the four tenets seem extremely rational, and thus worthy of being put into practice, while the outlying tenet is so absurd that you can't even fathom why anyone would espouse it. Is the belief system "good enough," or should you shave the absurd part off before working with the belief system? Would you ever be okay with converting to a belief system that gets most things right, but with which you differ on at least one major point?
Posted by Leaving Society at 9:27 PM 1 comment:
1 comment:
AnonymousNovember 2, 2011 at 12:59 PM
You know you could probably try teaching a class in poorly conceived and implemented metaphors.
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