14 KiB
[RT] Raikoth: Laws, Language, and Society - a description of a fictional government that always tries to take the most effective action
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Author: u/None *
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URL: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/06/raikoth-laws-language-and-society/
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Score: 2
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Created: 2014-02-26T19:00:22
Post:
Comments:
u/Nepene [+5] (7 hours later)
It doesn't read as very rational.
It works with three magical things to make each thing work.
A magical language that it is impossible to insult people in.
Magical predictions that mean all laws work perfectly (ignoring any uncertainty).
Completely obedient citizens who allow the government to do as they wish, up to mass sterilization with untested future technologies, mass forced drug use, and imposition of a government that doesn't favor them.
This sort of stuff is an error I often see from those who want to optimize the world. They try to attack what they see as the root issues (ignoring the actual, weighty issues that plague society) with some sort of magic or scifi-technology.
They don't tend to consider that any society with their magic would be better, and they rarely consider how actual real life issues would impact their society.
From tvtropes.
As a corollary of this principle, the intelligence of a character in rational fiction must never be an Informed Ability. We must see them being smart, not be told that they are smart. They must think of brilliant things to do which we ourselves could have realized are possible. As in a Fair Play Whodunnit, the character must make deductions that we ourselves could realistically have made. Only by solving puzzles which are, from the readers' perspective, at least slightly fair, can the character's good sense be convincingly exhibited. (Note that the ability to exhibit smart options and strategies means that this is not the same principle as a Fair Play Whodunnit; and fair-play insights may happen throughout the novel, not just in ways relevant to a mystery plot.)
That is what their powers are. Informed abilities that magically solve all of societies problems, without actually ever showing any smart options and strategies.
u/None [+6] (13 hours later)
The thorniest problem was moral speech: what should “good” mean in a perfect language? Here the logician-monks spent millennia refining a utilitarian superstructure until it described exactly how to aggregate preferences to create a utility function for the entire society. The resulting book, the Risurion-Silk, was declared to be literally an incarnation of God, who was, after all, only another word for the concept of maximal goodness. “Good” was declared to mean “increasing the function described in the Risurion-Silk” or alternately “increasing the degree to which the Universe instantiates God”.
Yeah, really. Dear fucking God. You do NOT get to just wave your hands and Solve Ethics Forever. Who was this written by, Luke Muehlhauser?
Ok, ok, I kid, but seriously guys, no, this does not maketh the sense. Downvoted despite my great liking for Slate Star Codex.
u/Escapement [+4] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (18 hours later)
When I first read Raikoth a while back, I noticed a lot of the unexplained future tech solving problems also. I think a few of the problem solutions are interesting to read about in direct proportion to how likely they are to ever occur - e.g. the personal monitoring devices to deter crime seems like an interesting idea, if you can resolved the ways it is hopelessly open to abuse and possible to cause of a great deal of problems and drawbacks in addition to it's benefits, see e.g. Black Mirror Season 1 Episode 3, The Entire History Of You.
In addition, beyond the technology I thought my personal incredulity was tripped by the fact that this was a utopia that managed to fail pretty hard for no apparent reason. Seriously - it looks to be about the physical land area/size of Great Britain, with a total population less than New York City, and isn't noted as expanding or having a lot of people enter it or otherwise being particularly sucessful at growing and subsuming it's neighbours in spite of spending a huge amount of time discussing how awesome it is and how it makes perfect decisions and everyone enjoys living in it; presumably this is because of the constraints of the constructed world he was creating it within, I guess, but it still feels wrong when judged as single-author fiction - you'd think a society that is amazingly prosperous and happy and sucessful and intelligently governed would be notably powerful on the world stage? Unless it's surrounded by a bunch of other states which are all even more plausible and believable utopias, in which case one wonders why Raikoth is not more influenced by these superior outside ideas and is instead clinging to less-effective utopian ideals with all of it's stuff about effectively making utilitarian decisions?
Also, it has a long list of tech advances over our modern era but no note that the tech is still advancing or changing, but instead that everything is perfectly adapted to the tech as it is with long legal and societal adaptations to e.g. perfect personal monitors. Basically, I have a hard time really believing in any utopia in which technological and societal progress is ended - I believe that any utopia we build with the tools of today will be obsolete in fifty years time, as human understanding of everything from computing technology to our own minds to effective political structures advances.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
I think a few of the problem solutions are interesting to read about in direct proportion to how likely they are to ever occur - e.g. the personal monitoring devices to deter crime seems like an interesting idea, if you can resolved the ways it is hopelessly open to abuse and possible to cause of a great deal of problems and drawbacks in addition to it's benefits, see e.g. Black Mirror Season 1 Episode 3, The Entire History Of You.
Oh ye absent god's save us from those who would save us from others. To paraphrase Franklin:
You can have freedom or security, the man who wishes to give up some up some of the former for the latter will have neither and deserves it.
I wouldn't trust a saint, a genius, a committee of geniuses, a benevolent despot, a GFAI or myself with behavioral control of people. Or to quote/paraphrase again Heinlein:
Man is a feral animal.
I look forward to reading, to see the mistakes, but things like this is why [spoiler to 3 worlds collide] (#s "The solution was to defect rather than for humanity to become inhuman.")
Edit Started reading. . . very foolishly idealist. The gadget for civic monitoring is well devized, but the overall concepts miss the TLDR problem of markets. Misquoting, and paraphrasing again to sum up a critical failure:
Any society that does not follow the principle women and children first is doomed to fail.
This society doesn't shut up and multiply! If it is as happy and smart as it claims to be it should be taking over via market forces, for the good of humanity, or maybe it realizes it's no longer human . . . shrug worth a read but more to illustrate idealized mistakes; I think.
u/Escapement [+2] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (a day later)
I don't particularly advocate personal monitoring devices to deter crime in our present society, with any of our present levels of technology or societal structure; you will note that I hedged my statement with both generalities and with a specific example of one of the many ways that such a system could be problematic from fiction.
There are certain programs involving police having manditory personal cameras on themselves that seem based on popular news stories that I have seen to be having positive results in terms of preventing police abuse of citizens, preventing unwarranted accusations of police abuse of citizens; however I have not done the stats and looked at actual studies myself, so I can't pretend to advocate for their use.
That said, I don't know where/how you jumped to behavioural control of people. I would appreciate some more explanation of how one jumps from 'voluntary self-monitoring devices that upload encrypted data to a secure store only you can access with a societal prohibition on forcing access to another's' to behavioural control - if you can unpack that connection I would be most grateful.
Finally, on the Heinlein quote - I have no idea how the quote specifically applies to the subject of my quote.
For what it's worth, I looked up a few similar quotes from Heinlein, and the nearest I could find is that 'man is a wild animal' (Expanded Universe), where he credits it as being lifted from Charles Galton Darwin in his book The Next Million Years. He writes the following:
He cannot be tamed and remain Man; his genius is bound up in the very qualities which make him wild. With this self-knowledge, bleak, stern, and proud, goes the last hope of permanent peace on Earth; it makes world government unlikely and certainly unstable. Despite the fact that we are (as always) in a condition of marginal starvation, this fact makes all measures of population control futile-other than the ancient, grisly Four Horsemen, and even they are not effective; we finished World War III with a hundred million more people than when we started.
He also writes:
Nor can we be "improved" by genetic breeding; it is not in our nature to accept it. Someday we may be conquered by superbeings from elsewhere, then bred according to their notions-and become dogs, rather than wolves. (I'm betting that we will put up a fight!) But, left to our own resources, improvements in our breed must come the hard way, through survival and we will still remain wild animals.
Needless to say, I find this idea that humans can't become better through their own efforts to be both faintly silly now but very normal-for-the-time anti-transhumanist. However, even from when he was writing it seemed very naive of the the idea that people might not want their offspring to have a decent shot at birth defects, etc which could by themselves constitute major genetic modifications. Also, he wrote extensively about a fictional society which did in fact improve it's own breed in one respect (longevity) - see Methuselah's Children and Time Enough for Love and all the related books (or just read Methuselah's Children because a lot of Heinlein's later books, especially e.g. To Sail Beyond The Sunset, are not particularly worth anyone's time).
Also, the quote is part of a longer piece (The Third Millenium Opens) that is factually wrong about a lot of the stuff that has any factual basis which can be examined rigorously, which is to some extent excusable in 1956 when it was written but nonetheless makes the piece extremely unpersuasive to me (he was attempting to write as if writing a piece from 2001). In the same article where he writes about this man is a wild animal idea he takes very seriously (as a given) the idea of life after death as being proven scientifically by hypnotic regression to past lives as in the Morey Bernstein (Bridey Murphy) case - while including a disclaimer later on that he didn't necessarily believe it - which ultimately makes it unclear to me how much of this stuff Heinlein actually believed, and how much he made up on the spot to make an interesting article about future perspectives.
At any rate, I have no idea how this man is a wild animal quote applies to the idea of a surveillance society specifically, and can only see a little how it applies to the behavioural control idea - considering Heinlein seemed to mostly be talking about our habit of not changing our own selves. I would appreciate your explaining your thoughts in more detail. It's quite possible the man as a feral animal quote comes from some other Heinlein source I can't remember - he wrote voluminously, after all - in which case, if you could provide the source, I would be happy to look at the surrounding context to better understand your position.
u/None [+2] (an hour later)
Here are all posts of this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/index-posts-on-raikoth/
u/AmeteurOpinions [+2] Finally, everyone was working together. (4 hours later)
That's actually pretty cool. Nice find.
u/KJ6BWB [+1] (9 days later)
We can't currently recreate the Angels, though. That's the thing about communism. If you could somehow guarantee perfect rulership (Angels, perhaps), then communism, or a dictatorship, would be the perfect form of government. We're currently stuck with humans, though, and humans assign different values to different things and sometimes humans change, for the better or for the worse. In that situation, some sort of republic/democracy is for the best, since you can theoretically vote out the people who are no longer doing a good job.
I mean, take a look at the "does raising the minimum wage create more jobs or mean there will be less jobs" debate. Consider that Pennsylvania/New Jersey study when New Jersey raised their minimum wage and people polled fast food restaurants and found that the number of jobs increased. Then another group decided to not poll the restaurants but look at the payroll records of the companies involved and found that the number of jobs decreased. Then the first group looked at government data and how many people filed for unemployment, and how many new W2's were filed, etc., and found that the number of jobs increased. And since then there have been many studies by many people all of which show that the number of jobs either increases or decreases after the minimum wage is increased and people are basically free to pick whichever studies best match with their own opinion. We don't have something like the Angels, who can definitively say with no argument from anyone else, that X is better because of Y. This system of government, as great as it now is, wouldn't work for our current world.
It's a nice story, really great, had some good things to consider, but it's not practical. There's not much that we can really use today, in this world.