From: Phil Goetz (philgoetz@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Feb 07 2005 - 10:28:53 MST
--- David Clark <clarkd@rccconsulting.com> wrote:
> I think randomly selecting people to govern is a
> *very* bad idea. The only
> time it approaches being acceptable is when all the
> people could make
> decisions *equally* well. That is definitely not
> the case in our current
> world and probably wouldn't be the case in an
> environment peopled
> exclusively by transhumans.
The thing is, we aren't usually faced with a situation
in which there is a hard decision to make, and our
officials weigh the options and use their intellect
to choose that which is best for the country.
We are faced with situations in which it doesn't
matter how smart or wise our officials are, because
they are acting in the interest of a few special
interests who fund them, rather than in the interest
of the country. It would be better to have a dumb
person trying to solve our problems, than a dozen
very smart people trying to use our money to solve
some elite group's problems.
> Linus Pauling might have been
> a brilliant chemist and
> researcher but he definitely got in wrong with
> vitamin C.
Huh? Off-topic: Linus Pauling was less wrong in
going overboard plugging vitamin C, than the rest
of the medical establishment was in saying, at the
time, that there was no medical reason to take
more than 60mg of vitamin C a day (and trying to
enforce that by laws prohibiting the sales of larger
vitamin supplements).
- Phil
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