Velocity of ideology (and other musings)

[archerships]

* Velocity of ideology. Given reasonable assumptions about human information processing ability (rate of speech, reading rate of spoken word, etc.) and conversion/dropout rates ( the percentage of people exposed to an ideology who 'convert' to/dropout of that ideology) it should be possible to determine an upper bound on the rate at which an ideology can spread through a population. Surely someone has done this calculation before, but if so, I haven't seen it.
* How to create a business cult. Reference Apple, Krispy Kreme, Wegman's.

* What if Paris Hilton got the bomb? What would our world be like if a working atom bomb were as easy to construct as, say, a handgun? While Do-It-Yourself nuclear bomb's may not possible any time soon, biological weaponry of similar destructive power is likely to become feasible shortly.

* How could an ancap protection agency protect it's customers against the U.S. government? How might such an agency start? Reference Clayton Christianson's Innovator's Dilemma. Discuss legal mutual aid society. How else could a private state incubate and become powerful enough to challenge modern nation-states before the nation-states realized what was happening?

* Macro-parasites. Unions, governments, religions, corporations have both parasitic and symbiotic natures. Can we learn anything from how humans deal with biological micro-parasites and apply it to macro-parasites?

* How is the U.S. government different from a really big home owner's association? Do we already live in ancap world?

* Breaking the Social Contract. Statists often reference the mythical 'social contract', which supposedly obligates everyone to obey the government. Why not spell this contract out? If we did so, would anyone voluntarily sign it? Would it hold up in court?

* Profitable Revolutionaries. How can you make money by fighting the government? Discuss ocean liners, seasteading, medical tourism, social policy bonds, private security forces, private armies, arms manufacturing, mutual aid societies.

* Why do libertarians hate the government? Libertarians are often accused of being childly anti-authoritarian, rebelling against the state while at the same time enjoying the benefits that the state provides. Yet libertarians have no problem paying for the other acoutrements of adulthood -- insurance, dental care, house payments, etc. So why do people resent paying for government "services".

* Cryonics: The Ultimate Survival Strategy. How do you measure the efficacy of survivalist preparations? One way to measure it might be by 'expected man-years/dollar'. Survivalists often spend tens of thousands of dollars to prepare for events that are unlikely and rare. The expected man-years saved/dollar is quite low. Why not put some of that money to prepare for the one event that we know will happen: your own death.

* Security Ruler. Governments are often justified on the grounds that they "protect" us from foreign invasion. However, how do we measure how much they protect us? How do we know that they don't cause more harm than they prevent?

* The Chimera of the Soul. The implications of chimeras for the religious believers who think the soul enters the body at conception.

Comments

RE: US Govt. vs. Homeowners' Association

[kenshi.livejournal.com]

Although there are a few stong degrees of disanalogy between the two, they are far more similar than not. That's a point I've been trying to make to my libertarian friends for many years (often to no avail).

Indeed, I think a fair argument could be made that, assuming the US Govt closed up shop tomorrow, any ancap evolutionary replacement would ultimately come to resemble it so much that the exercise would largely be moot.

Re: US Govt. vs. Homeowners' Association

[crasch.livejournal.com]

I agree that they are largely analagous. However, I don 't think that governments are anywhere close to a global maximum in terms of "customer" satisfaction. I think that there are changes we could make that would make them much more palatable.

Re: US Govt. vs. Homeowners' Association

[kenshi.livejournal.com]

Carrying the anology perhaps a bit too far, although homeowners' associations allow member participation in decision making (voting), they are not "customer serving" organizations. Rather, they are primarily exclusionary maintainers. This means that they are intended to exclude negative externalities and maintain a shared wasting asset of some sort ("neighborhood character" or "property values") and do not otherwise provide services or products. The US government serves almost exactly the same purpose, albeit on a very large scale.

Re: US Govt. vs. Homeowners' Association

[kenshi.livejournal.com]

I didn't say it was a perfect analogy. However, your criticism is not really applicable.

Homeowners' Associations are monopolies: geographic monopolies. You certainly have the right to move away from that neighborhood if you don't like the rules (just as you are free to emigrate if you don't like the US government), however you cannot both choose to live there and not abide by the rules (convenants) and responsibilities that come with the membership in the homeowners' association (which is not voluntary except in rare circumstances). That means paying association dues (taxes) even if you don't want to (failure to do so resulting in forfeiture of your property rights via a lien held by your neighbors).

In fact, homeowners' associations are typically far more autocratic and restrictive than the US government is allowed to be.

Re: US Govt. vs. Homeowners' Association

[kenshi.livejournal.com]

Simple: market efficiency and the business organization growth cycle. After three to four generations of management, ancap "government service providers" will have reached a high level of corporatism or will have failed financially and been overtaken by those who have. That's what happens in markets as they mature and commoditize: massive consolidation as only the largest, most efficient, lowest-cost providers survive. Among those remaining large competitors, market exigencies are so restrictive that they behave as if in collusion even if they aren't, creating a de facto cartel. There are localized exceptions in niche markets, obviously, but they don't really count outside their very limited bailiwick. You can see exactly the same process in the increasing federalization of government in the US over the last 200 years, or in the way niche providers are mostly destroyed every time a big box retailer moves into their catchment area, yet the big boxes happily co-exist with one another to the point where they are largely indistinguishable (Lowe's vs. Home Depot, for instance).

Most ancap advocates seem to forget that the US government is actually an evolved response to social problems faced by its stakeholders, and not a top-down imposition by fiat. To be fair, most present-day governmental activists also forget this.

Re: US Govt. vs. Homeowners' Association

[crasch.livejournal.com]

You think Windows is a monopoly? How much competition must exist before there is a "competitive market" vs. a monopoly?

I agree with your analysis of why the FedGov's service is poor (high switching costs). I also think that the question of whether ancap will work is largely undecided.

I'm interested in the home owner's association analogy as a response to some libertarian's arguments that taxation is theft, since most agree that a HOA is not theft.

I also think discussing why the FedGov is similar to a HOA will help tease out how an ancap society would differ from what we have now.

Rather than treat the FedGov as an entity distinct from theoretical ancap protection agencies, what if we instead treated it as a existing market dominating protection agency with rather poor business practices? What would be the best way to for new entrants into the field to compete? How can we prevent the new entrants from becoming just as bad as the FedGov?

If the FedGov is like a HOA, what can we learn from HOA's? How do successful HOA's keep their member's happy? What happens to bad HOA's? How do they breakdown? What forms of HOA governance are most successful?

Re: US Govt. vs. Homeowners' Association

[kenshi.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[troglodyteking.livejournal.com]

Your "What if Paris Hilton got the bomb?" question reminds me of a pretty interesting short story by Frank Herbert called Committee of the Whole. It was originally published in a magazine, but I read it in a book The Worlds of Frank Herbert. In it a guy designs an easily-assembled, highly powerful laser pistol and secretly distributes the design all over the world. He then goes before a congressional committee (on an entirely different question) and reveals the laser, and essentially asserts that physical coercion is now dead, because any person can build a laser and create havoc if he so chooses. I am not summarizing it very well, I think you would enjoy it (assuming you can get your hands on a copy).