2008-05-13 Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality

2008-05-13 \science\libertarianism\Overcoming Bias/articles LessWrong Eliezer Yudkowsky http://lesswrong.com/lw/qb/science_doesnt_trust_your_rationality/ Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality &ldquo;Scott Aaronson suggests that Many-Worlds and libertarianism are similar in that they are both cases of bullet-swallowing, rather than bullet-dodging...&rdquo;  The core argument for libertarianism is historically motivated distrust of lovely theories of "How much better society would be, if we just made a rule that said XYZ." If that sort of trick actually worked, then more regulations would correlate to higher economic growth as society moved from local to global optima. But when some person or interest group gets enough power to start doing everything they think is a good idea, history says that what actually happens is Revolutionary France or Soviet Russia.

The plans that in lovely theory should have made everyone happy ever after, don't have the results predicted by reasonable-sounding arguments. And power corrupts, and attracts the corrupt.

So you regulate as little as possible, because you can't trust the lovely theories and you can't trust the people who implement them.

You don't shake your finger at people for being selfish. You try to build an efficient system of production out of selfish participants, by requiring transactions to be voluntary. So people are forced to play positive-sum games, because that's how they get the other party to sign the contract. With violence restrained and contracts enforced, individual selfishness can power a globally productive system.

Of course none of this works quite so well in practice as in theory, and I'm not going to go into market failures, commons problems, etc. The core argument for libertarianism is not that libertarianism would work in a perfect world, but that it degrades gracefully into real life. Or rather, degrades less awkwardly than any other known economic principle. (People who see Libertarianism as the perfect solution for perfect people, strike me as kinda missing the point of the "pragmatic distrust" thing.) Originally published in Overcoming Bias, and later moved to LessWrong by the author   