[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

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On 5/10/21 12:10 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
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>     • civilization is already a cooperative enterprise, it's just a matter of cooperation's extent/ubiquity
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>         Agree. That's one of the reasons Trump's norm-breaking was so destructive.
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>     • there's nothing supernatural, so all solutions have to be built on science
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>         Agree there is no supernatural. I don't see that implies that "all solutions have to be built on science." Most of our norms are not science-based.

That's a reasonable point, as was Dave's w.r.t. belief in the supernatural being an encoding for norms. But norms aren't good enough. What's needed is more like what EricS invoked way back when in the context of economic mobility. We need an (maybe more than a few) error correcting mechanisms for when the norms are shown inadequate or obsolete. And it seems to me that scientific knowledge is the most stable kind of knowledge. Not "stable" in the sense of never changing, but stable in the sense of being *founded* ... on solid ground. A constitution is pretty good. But, again, our current problems with "originalism" and "living document"-ism show explicitly how that can fail.

>     • innovation, technology, culture, etc. are limited only by nature; so in principle the things we build (including governments) can be as big and complex as the natural world
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>         Is this controversial?

Yes. On the one hand, there are credible arguments that the technology "stack", as it were, increases degrees of freedom versus decreases degrees of freedom. So, perhaps in the vein of von Hayek (and Pieter), any bureaucracy we put in place might be, necessarily, a limiting structure rather than a freeing structure. It would be arrogant to assume an engineered structure does a better job at some objective than a "natural" structure. This principle takes the stance that our structures can increase the degrees of freedom.

>     • class is a cultural construct; we create it; hence we can eliminate it
> 
>         Is this controversial?

Yes. There is a significant number of us who believe in meritocracy, where poverty can be an *indicator* for something you deserve ... even to the extent that some people seem to believe you might have done that in a *past life* or somesuch nonsense. This principle attempts a kind of "blank slate" or "universally capable" conception of initial conditions. The principle isn't well-worded, though, like the rest of these. It partly implies that, e.g., if you're born blind, the world and our society are complex enough so that you can be just as, if not more, productive and meritorious as a sighted person.

>     • the spectral signature of organization sizes is present in nature and should be mirrored in society (e.g. power laws for org sizes, small-world networks, etc)  
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>         Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean that it's important to be aware of advances in our understanding of complex organizations, I certainly agree. 

Yeah, I don't like the wording of that, either. What I'm going for is a generalization of "to each according to need, from each according to ability", which I don't like at all. I'd like to formulate more like the definition of an "ecology", where the waste of one is the food for another ... or along the lines of the eukaryotic perspective on trees Roger forwarded.

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