Re: A mathematical, non-corruptable, algorithmic, democratic and free system of government and society

[Andrew Yu]

vidak wrote:
> Your email is warmly welcomed. I have had exactly the same thoughts
> recently.
> 
> It is interesting to me because, and I have no shame in admitting this,
> I am an anarchist. I see Free Software as a way to resist the State and
> try and dissolve it completely.

These are things that I agree with that I don't usually say because of
*practical reasons* and *some type of law that's an exception to article
25 (freedom of expression) in the PRC*.

> I would highly recommend you go back to them and show them GNU Guix?
> Maybe the point is moot now. Guix is _insanely_ advanced, and that's the
> angle you could take to them--the perfect package manager has finally
> been built. To my mind, we've now perfectly solved the problem.

Good idea.  I use the Guix package manager on my system.  I've tried
Guix System, but there was a problem---Guix is still heavily integrated
with UNIX-like operating systems (GNU/Linux), where everything is
supposed to be a file in specific locations.  How /gnu/store and Guix
profiles work causes insane compatibility and maintainance issues in
UNIX-like systems.

As far as I know, Guix is written in Scheme, a dialect of Lisp.  It may
be a good idea to implement a fork of it in
http://metamodular.com/Common-Lisp/lispos.html.

We might use Lisp machines instead of poorly designed modern processor
architecture, utilizing functional programming to a great extent.  (Or
Haskell, but that's not the point lol)

> The way I look at the issue, though, is that the problem is with Statist
> society in general. Hierarchical societies are not natural for humans,
> so I maintain. I like GNU for its American sort of approach to this. I
> don't share a lot of American culture, but GNU reminds me of Henry David
> Thoreau's famous epithet: "the best government is that which governs
> least of all, that is to say: not at all".

What a government should do is a crucial question to be discussed in
this project.  I believe that the government must keep some control over
people.  Life is a sacrifice between (protection and liberty) => freedom.
Please take a look at my notes below.

> I come from an anarcho-communist approach. Perhaps we should have a
> discussion about attracting attention to the radical elements of GNU--we
> could convince people to join on that basis?

I live in China, with communism.  Not going to comment here.  I'd be
willing to discuss that in private, though.  My OpenPGP key is
https://www.andrewyu.org/andrew.asc.

> Anyway, I have gone on far too long.
> Awesome to read your email (:

Definitely shorter than many two the previous emails :)  Great to hear
from people who have thoughts on government power too.

> ~vidak
> 
> https://zoinks.one/vidak

I get a blank page when I go there, with "To use Pleroma, please enable
JavaScript."  Apparantly Pleroma is free software, glimpsed through the
JavaScript, whitelisted it in LibreJS.

---

From your website/profile (you post so much, can't read them all):

> We anarchists distinguish ourselves from other movements and political
> organisations by holding to a concept of social and political freedom
> that is radically different—and for that reason far more
> authentic—than any other. Where virtually every other political
> tendency seeks to capture or win power through the state—be it merely
> some rung or portion of it, or its entire structure—anarchists argue
> that we should do away with it.
> 
> We seek the formation of a society where there are no large masses of
> people, such as ourselves, who are Governed and coerced by small
> numbers of rulers—be they in Parliaments, Centrelink offices, Courts,
> or law firms. Our picture of the future imagines a Western Australia
> where people are, both individually and through our communities, the
> deciders of their own fates. We anarchists have good reason to say
> that States and Governments are the places where culture and
> creativity go to die.
>
> Every kind of social power and social domination of a minority over a
> majority comes with its own type of slavery. The boss over the
> worker. The principal of the State school over a student. The landlord
> over the renter. The Centrelink bureaucrat over the unemployed and
> impoverished, and so on. We say that when you look at social
> organisation this way, you see life in our communities for what it
> is—the suffering of the commanded by those who wield command.

Definitely understandable, but consider two simple problems:

1.  What if, in an anarchy, people get murdered?  Is that okay?
2.  Are people in the anarchy free to setup a dictatorship, with guns
    and cannons?  Is this power limited?  If it is, how is this an
    anarchy?

Boils down to the exact definition of anarchy.

> Society should be, so we say, directly democratic. That is, the people
> who are affected by decisions should be the ones making them. People
> in houses should be the ones controlling them. People who work should
> should be the ones who decide how and why that work is done.

Another problem:  it's hard to keep up educating people on things that
affect them.  Few people are good at all of: economics, environmental
protection, mathematics, political science, psychology, and all other
things that must be considered while running a country.  We may be able
to work out this education, not in the forseeable future, but a good
idea nevertheless.  Ancient Greece (especially Athens) is democratic,
but people who can't make good military/diplomatic decisions partially
caused its war with Sparta and subsequently its fall.  We have
representative democracy, not only because direct democracy doesn't
scale (this could be overcome with blockchains and decentralized
networking), it's also because the people don't make the best decisions
in the long term.  There are people who specialize in fields, because we
can't learn everything.

Of course, modern decisions require knowledge from multiple "fields".
As much as we are trying to understand everything in the world, we
cannot (proof needed, intuition used).  Currently, people just work
together (or fight with each other, allowed by bugs in political
systems).  For reasons not to be discussed in this brief email, humans
communicate with each other much less efficiently than when we are
thinking by ourselves, assuming the combined set of knowledge is the
same.  Rethinking collaboration is needed.

However, as a result of elections in representative democracy,
politicians' goal in mind is to win the next election to get sweet
money.  Elected?  Sure, just do everything promised, then sit in wage
and bribes and relax doing nothing at all for the people.  Just make
sure the people who elected you are pleased and get reelected and get
money.  This must be overcome.

Before we get rid of money entirely, the easiest way to do that would be
to pay politicians by their performance (which would be hard to
measure), not to give them a fixed/slightly-variable wage.

Maybe a system where everybody voices their opinion would work.  We
create a distributed network (e.g. a blockchain) (assuming people have
computers, and that RSA hasn't been cracked yet or there's an
alternative algorithm) that stores the reputation of each person's
thoughts in a specific field, and their voices are taken more with a
higher reputation, kind of like how Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow works,
but distributed (avoiding a central authority which may become corrupt).

There are two major problems with this approach.  Firstly, with the
development of science, fields become blurry.  It may be hard to feel
the existance of "fields" at all!  At that point, if we just give a
generic catchall reputation to each person, it might be abused for
totally irrelevant source-of-reputation and use-of-reputations.

(Note here that the "reputation" may be a higher-dimensional number,
something like $1+2i+3j+4k$.  They don't need to be defined in terms of
reals, of course.)

Secondly, simply put:  Who, or what algorithm, after collecting those
"voices", gives the final decision?

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