On 12/21/2014 3:36 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
But it's not just the bandits, it's also game theory. Modern democracies suffer from a strong tendency to become Keynesian beauty contests. Very easily the optimal strategy for the big parties becomes a move to the average opinion. Some people say this is a good thing. I think it's a dangerous thing because it's self-reinforcing and because consensus and truth are very different things.
So are truth and personal opinion, especially on questions of value. There are many advantages to cooperation and community. So there is a trade-off between having rules of social interaction which support cooperation and limiting the rules so as to allow individuality. In general I'd say modern societies provide far more individual freedom than did the tribal societies in which humans evolved - just as a big city provides much more anonymity than a small town.
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