<story><title>Eliezer Yudkowsky: Is That Your True Rejection?</title><url>http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/07/eliezer-yudkowsky/is-that-your-true-rejection/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>Interestingly enough, my own small-l libertarianism has nothing to do with the innate properties of people. It&apos;s about how those properties come together into groups. I have found, again and again, that when people organize into large groups and form systems of getting along it never works. The larger the group, the more complex the system, the longer the system has been in place, the worst the results are. I don&apos;t think there is any intervention, nature or nurture, that would change this. To feel otherwise, to me, would be to say that there is a perfect person. That seems more than a little scary. I find our defects, when working together, give us adaptability. Counter-intuitively, I believe that the properties most of us would desire in a population are probably reverse-correlated to growth and evolution. [insert long explanation about the value of variance across multiple dimensions here]&lt;p&gt;Representative democracies are kind of a hack to this law. You try to pick somebody to represent you and make decisions, you split up powers among various competing branches of government, etc. What is happening in the west, though, is the idea of a &quot;restart&quot; is mostly gone. It&apos;s just the same guys wearing different hats that take turns ruling.&lt;p&gt;But to me these are properties of how systems of people operate. The word &quot;government&quot; has little to do with it. The reason to fight as hard as possible for individual freedom has nothing to do with selfishness: the more freedom the individual retains, the less the stakes are, and the slower the process of system corruption becomes. My ultimate rejection would be a demonstration of a stable, creative, dynamic, adaptive, and productively chaotic society of non-trivial size that had been in existence for more than a century or so. Hate to set the bar that high. Need to think about that some more to see if I could make my position more logically approachable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Eliezer Yudkowsky: Is That Your True Rejection?</title><url>http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/07/eliezer-yudkowsky/is-that-your-true-rejection/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mkopinsky</author><text>The article he&apos;s responding to is at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/06/michael-shermer/liberty-and-science/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/06/michael-shermer/liber...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>