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#76 2022-07-04 09:31:46

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

No, I'm not sure on Corporal Punishment but sometimes on a rare occasion a 'Stick' must be used to teach. Countries that removed Corporal Punishment have not seen a reduction in juvenile crimes, instead more recently youth crimes are on the increase, the so called 'enlightened' countries who wanted to get rid of Capital punishment have not seen a reduction in murder or bombing or shooting, instead murder, rape, homicide rates might be increasing in recent years.

Mars could be both as good and as evil as Earth has been. If Mars with its growing colonies will have the crimes of Earth then what go our scifi and fantasy stories tell, an especially evil criminal gets smashed with a giant ax or war hammer or bullet to the dead or 'old sparky' their lifeless bodies decay and compost finally becoming useful as part of the new soil on Mars. Punishment has been part of human civilization for thousands of years, it will not go away unless there is Lawless Anarchy. The Death Penalty or Capital punishment I'm of the opinion now that the human race sometimes produces some especially bad people, mass killers, rapists, serial killer, pedophiles, dictator tyrants. I'm not a big fan of a 'Death Penalty' but it should be used in exceptional circumstances for especially the very very bad people. On a large scale colony you may be talking about thousands upon thousands of people, NASA or Russia or China or Japan or India Europe might send their best of the best to Mars but eventually something will slip through, with family born things will be a roll of the dice in regards to disorders, problem people or psychotic or personality problems. Those illiberal regressive radical Leftwing all knowing Western Europeans can continue ignoring victims of crimes and supporting criminal rights criminals who have already destroyed lives and stolen lives of others but they are dead wrong. The West is going the wrong way, I would also support some form of Prison with servitude or Punitive Labor or Prison Labour, why do people released from Japanese jails never want to go back inside ever again. Yet in the West prison is become a vacation or criminal education school for another criminal life, the Japanese tehy don't want to go back to jail  in their lives while in the West they are now producing repeat offenders with crimes getting worse and worse. I am reluctant to support corporal punishment infliction of physical pain upon a person’s body as punishment for a minor victimless crime or infraction but there could be exceptional circumstance where the scold or punishment from some type of father figure or authority is necessary. Sometimes a bad person will be 'born' maybe, people suggest that serial killer Ted Bundy was high IQ and highly manipulative, a high-functioning sociopath, he had skills to avoid police and say the correct words to manipulate others. However maybe in the future A.I itself will see past the barriers and illusions people use in language, maybe A.I will find a criminal better than cops, maybe it will see a troublesome kid before they get into trouble witht he Law, perhaps AI can read peoples mind and DNA, it will sense their temperature and electric signals and body language signals, it might even prevent crime before it happens.

Kbd512
was of the opinion any kind of Pre-Crime "Minority Report" machine was a bad idea and an attack on people's freedoms, perhaps he is correct.

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-07-05 06:51:40)

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#77 2022-07-04 09:39:05

kbd512
Administrator
Registered: 2015-01-02
Posts: 7,362

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Scott,

What you're affecting is far more important than some journal article published in some place that less than 1% of the entire human population is even aware exists.  This is about manipulating human belief systems.  That should never be casually done and you should never assume that you know what the end result will be.  I've seen scant evidence that human belief systems are self-correcting.  I've seen much better evidence that the average person will hold onto beliefs that ultimately lead to their own demise.  Your response is a total non-answer to a very serious and specific question that is entirely germane to the utility of manipulating belief systems, with or without any scientific principles applied.  People who don't question and can't explain why they believe what they believe are also the norm, rather than the exception.

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#78 2022-07-04 12:30:16

kbd512
Administrator
Registered: 2015-01-02
Posts: 7,362

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Mars_B4_Moon,

I think punishing people for things they have yet to do is a waste of time.  If I could go back in time and kill a baby Hitler before he ever became a ruthless and bloodthirsty tyrant, then I would leave history just as it was.  If it wasn't Hitler who did what he did, then perhaps someone more competent but equally evil and ruthless would've risen to power.  That is the most probable outcome from such a course of action.  I talked to my grandmother, who in turn talked to German immigrants arriving from Europe, about Hitler, after the war.  She grew up on a farm in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and even today I can confirm that there's still a very large population that still speaks German.  She asked this one German lady if Hitler was just an aberration or if Germans really hated the Jews that much.  The German lady responded, If it wasn't Hitler, then it would've been someone else, even someone from another country.  The Jews were universally hated."

That last part stuck with my young mind.  During the war with Germany, at least according to my grandmother, the ethnic Germans were subjected to every bit as much persecution at the hands of the other Americans, even in a place like Stevens Point where they represented a majority of the population.  America also put the Japanese into concentration camps, so the practice was clearly not limited to some intrinsically evil "other", meaning a dictionary example of "green eyed monsters",  nor any particular religion.  The nazis were mostly atheists, as were the communists, and they all put people in concentration camps.  The Catholics did it and still do it to the Muslims.  The Jews do it to the Muslims.  Whether the people profess to believe in a religion or no religion at all, they clearly believe in locking people up that they don't like, without charging them with a crime.  False imprisonment and forcing one group of people to submit to the will of other people, however capricious, is clearly part of human nature.  Everyone thinks they're justified in doing whatever they do to other people.  Any "science" that starts with false imprisonment and forcing others to behave in unnatural ways, in order to "prove something" to children, looks very suspicious to me, no matter what it purports to do.  In fact, it looks like another form or religion that incorporates the worst aspects of the existing religions.

Every attempt to manipulate human nature to become something it's not has been an abject failure.  Humans continually try communism over and over and over again, and always with the same result- mass starvation and mass murder and mass human misery.  The Utopianists have an idea, it's stuck in their heads, and it can be readily manipulated by highly intelligent but horrid people in very grotesque ways.  They keep doing it, though, because each new group of morons believes that they're "smarter" than the last group of morons, or have been imbued with some "special qualities" that makes them unique and unlikely or unable to repeat the mistakes of so many others.

Scott made the assertion that science is "self-correcting".  That may be true, but we also have proof that science can be manipulated in unbelievably destructive ways.  Discarding any experimental result that doesn't prove what you want it to prove is the first major failure of science, not because science has failed, but because humans have failed to separate their belief systems from their work.  The notion that "self-correction" is equivalent to infallibility is ridiculous.  After millions of people have been killed when "science" (the brains of people who are supposed to be educated, yet are also subject to beliefs as irrational and destructive as anyone who is not a scientist) finally realizes it made a mistake, then whatever "self-correction" that did occur is of little consolation to the dead or the predicament that the living find themselves in.

Whenever someone says to me, "I believe in science", I know that they're not professing to actually believe in the application of scientific principles to problem solving.  Quite the opposite is true.  They're really telling me that they treat science like a religion, with scientists serving as their high priests / priestesses, and will mindlessly follow it without consideration given to where "the science" is leading them.  Casually observing everything else they believe and how they behave when confronted with a counter-factual (according to their beliefs) result will swiftly confirm that.

The person asserting that "behaviorism" is a science must not be paying too close attention to what all the neuroscientists and neurosurgeons say when questioned about the way in which the human brain works.  Those conversations tend to start with, "Well, we're still trying to figure that out.  We know some things, but don't have all the answers, and still have a lot of learning to do."  If neuroscience is not a hard science, then neither is "behaviorism".  It's an art form with some scientific principles applied to the parts of it that we do understand, which isn't much.  The honest ones will tell you that.  This dishonest ones assert that they "know" far more than they actually do.

There's a reason that the application of medicine is called a "medical practice".  All of those doctors are practicing medicine, and hopefully becoming better at what they do over time.  If we had medicine "all figured out" and could guarantee that when we poked "X", that "Y" would happen, then we'd have actual hard science.  Mechanical engineering using known materials is a hard science.  We haven't "discovered" any complete surprises about steel for quite some time, quite unlike the continuous significant discovery process as it pertains to human brains and cognition.  Materials science and electro-chemistry, on the other hand, are still art forms.

Beyond that, any number of things can be modeled by a computer program that are functionally impossible in real life.  A shaft with zero clearance on a bearing surface spins freely in a computer simulation, because it's not physically impeded from moving, if overly-simplistic parts geometries are applied.  It won't spin at all if actually built that way.  In real life, shafts are not machined to absolute perfection.  We can and do mass-manufacture shafts that are machined to within the tolerance of a human red blood cell, though.  However, the slightest surface imperfection or temperature change or other environmental factor such as "dirt", that wasn't accounted for in the computer simulation, makes our "scientifically-derived" (based in mathematics) model quite worthless for understanding what's going on inside our machine.

Mathematics is the foundation of all valid science.  If you can't express your "science" in mathematical terms, then it's because you lack the understanding required to reduce what you've learned to a repeatable practice.  About 18 years ago, Scott stated that he was a "sociocultural systems engineer".  Well, I'm a "software engineer".  I work with statistical analysis / forecasting tools.  In my world, if 2 + 2 doesn't equal 4, then your program is wrong, not mathematics.  If you can't even formulate the equation necessary to reliably produce a given output, then the probability that you can systematize a successful implementation of your theory or model, is near-zero.

Do I realize that we can still do useful things, as it relates to human behavior, without having any mathematical models to work with?  Absolutely.  Showing kindness to others, another human brain construct with zero math behind it, can't be mathematically modeled or represented as some form of equation, but the empirical results still speak for themselves.  That said, the response or result of showing kindness to others is very far from assured.  A sociopath will simply use human behavior against others.  Any kindness you show to them may very well be used to murder you or others.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't be kind to others, even sociopaths, but it means there is no science that accurately predicts human behavior.  Even under the most heavily manipulated environments or operating scenarios, you get different results with different people.  Therefore, behaviorism is an art form with scientific observations made regarding the results of certain inputs.

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#79 2022-07-05 07:16:56

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

1984 Orwellian or...

Europe Will Have Surveillance Black Boxes inside your Car?
It's the science that made them think this way and pass these Laws?

EU demands speed limiters on all new cars: know the rules and how they work
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/1035 … -they-work
New cars launched in the European Union after 6 July must have Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) tech fitted by law.


Kbd512
I don't think punishing someone for a pre-Crime is correct and I do not think it should be done, what I do acknowledge is that many governments of the world now operate some kind of watcher system. Around the world there are people and machine look, pattern A.I statistics system that takes in numbers, any threat not just of drugs or of crime or terrorist areas, they can spot shooters and pick up on crimes, you may not like it but many regions of the world have their own 'Patriot Act'. Recently there was a shooter who had made threats on social media, he was photographed with dead cats, the made threats to rape girls, was troublesome with his grandma, police were called on during a fight with his mother, he threw stuff at cars, he even made vague threats to the school...it seems warning signs were missed and someone could have met that trouble person to prevent a crime.
of course this leads to Who Watches the Watcher, Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

Uvalde mother who got out of cuffs to rescue kids from shooting is now being harassed by police, lawyer says
https://news.yahoo.com/uvalde-mother-go … 46751.html

Angeli Rose Gomez, a Uvalde native, was working on a farm roughly half an hour away when she started getting calls about the shooting and rushed to the school.
Her lawyer, Mark Di Carlo, called the scene when she arrived "the most horrible scenario you could imagine

Gomez was stopped this month and told that police received a report that there were illegal immigrants in her car, which wasn't true.
"We think that was a pretense to harass her," Di Carlo said.

Is Police Harassment a flaw of corrupt humans?
or would an AI Car and Robot Police Dog Patrolling the streets act the very same way?

I try to approach many things with an open mind, I do not believe this is a case of zealotry I believe I am being objective here not the "I believe in science" type who treat science like a religion, with scientists serving as their high priests.
There were many social warning signs that this shooting or crime was about to happen and yet with all our technology these signs were missed.
Also it took a very long time for the human to react,  Uvalde Texas police despite having all the guns and technology were heavily criticized for their actions in response to the shooting, a mother handcuff, she was freed from cuffs, jumped the fence, went into the school unarmed and rescued her own kids while the Police simply 'Waited'? rumors on twitter they say Ramos himself was was arrested 4 years ago for his plans for a Public School Massacre, but the political people buried his juvenile record. For an AI solution to work does it really need to align with the dumb backward woke SJW regressive values of the society it is dealing with, but maybe it would have a better solution than your typical SJW identity politic or the diversity of pro-criminal political ideologies that exists today.

Imagine for a second you don't arm machine, but you had a transforming box outside a school... the Boston Dynamics Style Dogs would simply Activate and Run up to the Shooter and just play loud audio of a  'Bark' sound clip.
Perhaps this would have distracted the killer or made him waste his ammo and saved lives?

Would A.I have done a better job at humans to fight the Corona virus
or would the cost and loss of freedoms have proven too much?

What happens when the AI Robo machine cyborg and Animal of Mars gets almost the same right as the human in regards to access to shelter or energy?

Scott Beach wrote:

Scientocracy.  The laws and policies of the Government of Mars shall, to the greatest possible extent, be based on experimentally verifiable data.  The Government may be described as a “scientocracy”.

Scott Beach wrote:

This sounds like some of it might be a good idea on paper but my gut says I have a bad felling about this one.

Also take note of your own post # 58 in regards to the virus

Scott Beach wrote:

I do not trust the government to tell me that two plus two is four or anything else.

Scott

call it a different name
but in “scientocracy” we trust?

Behaviorology.  Behavioral science is based on the theory that the behavior of an organism is determined by its physiology, its history of reinforcement and punishment, and its current environment.  A human can use techniques based on that theory to shape his or her own behaviors.  The members of a human society can, by the politically coordinated application of behavior shaping techniques, establish and maintain a society that closely approximates a perfect society, a utopia.

This sounds too much like propaganda and manipulation, propaganda and manipulation can lead to other others and in the quest for a perfect Utopia taking peoples freedoms happened in Communist and Fascist times

Scott Beach wrote:

Social Control System.  The children of Mars shall be taught how to use behavior shaping techniques to shape their own and each others behaviors.  The Government may enact laws that prescribe and regulate the teaching of behavior shaping techniques.

maybe parents should have a say on the education of their kids


Deepmind’s New AI May Be Better at Distributing Society’s Resources Than Humans Are

https://singularityhub.com/2022/07/04/d … umans-are/

AI is proving increasingly adept at solving complex challenges in everything from business to biomedicine, so the idea of using it to help design solutions to social problems is an attractive one. But doing so is tricky, because answering these kinds of questions requires relying on highly subjective ideas like fairness, justice, and responsibility.

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-07-05 08:55:53)

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#80 2022-07-05 11:59:14

Scott Beach
Member
Registered: 2017-02-21
Posts: 180

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

kbd512: You wrote,

Scott stated that he was a "sociocultural systems engineer".

When I was a child I read about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions.  I watched mission launches on television, and I never missed an episode of Star Trek.  I was definitely a "Space Cadet".

When I was in college I took a psychology course and I read B.F. Skinner's eutopian novel "Walden Two".  I also took an anthropology course, where I had "close encounters" with the terms "ecological anthropology" and "sociocultural systems".  And in a "Cultural Geography" course I read about the most successful people on Earth: the Hutterites, who live in "colonies".

Many years later, I read about the Biosphere 2 project.

Biosphere 2 is an American Earth system science research facility located in Oracle, Arizona. Its mission is to serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching, and lifelong learning about Earth, its living systems, and its place in the universe...  Long-term it was seen as a precursor to gain knowledge about the use of closed biospheres in space colonizationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

In a magazine article, the Executive Director of Biosphere 2 was quoted as saying, "Biosphere 2 is not a behavioral experiment".  I thought that this was a strange thing for her to say.  I concluded that Space Cadets should join together and build a prototype Martian settlement.  The prototype would be an "experimental community" wherein human behavior would be carefully engineered to be compatible with the settlement's ecosystem.  (The term "experimental community" is borrowed from B.F. Skinner's 1968 article titled "The design of experimental communities". From: Sills, D. L. (Ed.) International encyclopedia of the social sciences, 58–65. New York: Crowell, Collier and Macmillan.)

Somewhere along the way, I coined the term "sociocultural systems engineering" and I defined it as "the design, construction, testing, and operation of sociocultural systems and their supporting ecosystems".

A Martian settlement will probably contain tens or hundreds or thousands of children who will eventually have to be socialized into adult roles that are crucial to the settlement's operation and survival.  I believe that each Martian settlement should have a very detailed and complete operating manual, something like an ISO 9000 quality management system.

The ISO 9000 family of quality management systems (QMS) is a set of standards that helps organizations ensure they meet customer and other stakeholder needs within statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product or service.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9000

Inadequate operating instructions can be expensive and extremely dangerous.

The operators were unable to restore the power level specified by the test program, which put the reactor in an unstable condition. This risk was not made evident in the operating instructions, so the operators proceeded with the test.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Scott


"It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints."  Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth

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#81 2022-07-05 14:30:53

Scott Beach
Member
Registered: 2017-02-21
Posts: 180

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

kbd512,

Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural_evolution

All human societies change.  Some societies change rapidly and others change slowly.  It has been my goal to create an intellectual tool box that gives people the power to control sociocultural evolution.  That is the underlying purpose of my "Draft Constitution of Mars".

Scott


"It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints."  Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth

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#82 2022-07-05 17:03:01

SpaceNut
Administrator
From: New Hampshire
Registered: 2004-07-22
Posts: 28,747

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Mars_B4_Moon post 79 did the police go after the false reporting of illegals as that was a crime.

How would AI have helped lower covid rates as its the people's rights to not obey law as they do not agree with what they are being told

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#83 2022-07-05 20:55:36

kbd512
Administrator
Registered: 2015-01-02
Posts: 7,362

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Mars_B4_Moon,

When someone communicates a threat to commit a felony, that act or utterance is itself a felony here in the United States, and punishable to a degree similar to the criminal act itself.  You can't execute someone for making such a threat, but if the person demonstrated the means to conduct such a crime and there was evidence showing that they were planning to carry it out, then that is sufficient for a sentence of 25 years to life imprisonment.  This mass-murdering cretin from Uvalde was also an adult, not a child.

Threatening to rape someone is a felony.  Threatening to shoot up a school is a terroristic threat, which is also a felony.  Dependent upon what was thrown at passing cars, such as bricks or rocks, then that's assault with a deadly weapon.  Some motorists are murdered every year by miscreants tossing rocks and bricks off of overpasses.  They think it's funny and videotape themselves doing it most of the time.  All of these crimes are serious offenses which should've resulted in a trial with at least one conviction, especially assault with a deadly weapon.

Virtually none of the people committing such crimes are ignorant (which doesn't affect culpability anyway, merely the type of punishment) or unaware that it's illegal to do what they've done.  They just don't care because the cities they live in are run by Democrats who refuse to charge the criminals after ample evidence of multiple crimes exists, or the Police who never arrest them to begin with.  Basically, it's a breakdown of societal order and application of law.  You don't see much of this in towns or cities run by Republicans, because they consistently prosecute people who commit these crimes, in order to take them off the streets and separate them from the rest of civilized society.

The Democrats want us to "trust the government", but when the time comes for the people in government to demonstrate prudent responses to life-and-death situations, and that all the Police training we paid for is actually worth something, they're as big a failure as the nutjobs they're supposed to be stopping.  Whenever you question the Democrats on this, they don't have any answers that pass muster, they just want to disarm the next batch of potential victims so that they can get their jollies watching the carnage on the evening news, and to pit half the electorate against the other half while they rob us blind.  In short, their political games are every bit as sick and perverse as the people committing the violent crimes.  Democrats either have zero answers, or no answers that make sense to people with basic morality and ethics, which they still teach in academia, but do not follow.

No ethics, no accountability, no admission of failure, and no concrete actions taken to do a better job next time is the nature of the problem.  It's not guns   While I realize that politicians of whatever political stripe will never take responsibility for their poor decision making skills, these days they don't even pretend that they'll do a better job next time.  If some part of their administrative or ideological baggage has failed them, they cling to it while the ship they're on, the Titanic, is silently slipping beneath the waves.  They'd much rather attack the victims, making them appear little different than the other group of crooks to the American people, or they want to disarm the next batch of crime victims.  Personal integrity?  That starts at the top, and because that's where it starts, it's nowhere to be found.  Maybe they think absolutely think everyone is equally stupid, merely because 51% of the people voted for them?  That's all I can figure.

Case in point:
Republicans - no universal background checks for weapons (proving that you're an authorized purchaser of firearms)
Democrats - no acceptance that guns don't up and decide to kill people (accepting that inanimate objects are not responsible for violence)

Republicans - no federal money for mental health care (until most recent bill); blew mad money on wars that led to more war and no peace
Democrats - no federal money for mental health care (until most recent bill); plenty of public money spent on all sorts of other frivolities without result or worse results

Speaking of trials, I have returned home from jury duty.  Only 30 out of about 90 of us were selected for the trials of the day, so the rest were allowed to go home.  You only get $6 for jury duty, so I donated it to the Victims of Violent Crime.  It's not worth the tax paperwork and it went to a good cause.  It cost me about $15 in gasoline to get there and come back, but it's my day off so it worked out fine.  Citizens are required to demonstrate adherence to civic duty unto a government run by people who only seem interested in enriching themselves and amassing undeserved power (both political parties, and to an absurd degree).

Anyway, onto your futuristic "fix" to this violent crime problem:

If the AI-enabled robot is modeled off of human behavior, then it will have all the same flaws as unscrupulous humans do.  What other observable sentient being's behavioral repertoire do they have to use to "train" RoboCop with?  That's my first question regarding how this would work, if it could be made to work at all.

Regarding your unarmed guard robot concept, I fail to see the point if the criminal is armed, unless said machine can resist small arms fire.  If that's the case, then I'll bet it's pretty heavy.  Why not have that thing sit on the shooter's chest until the Police arrive?  If the guy suffocates to death, then that's just too bad.  Then we can tell the Police to take their time responding, like the Uvalde Police did.  "Yeah, fellas some twerp thought he was going to shoot up our school, but Rover here is sitting on his chest right now and Rover weighs about as much as your average gun safe.  He kinda looks like he's turning blue, but maybe he's just contemplating the meaning of life.  Anyway, whenever you decide to show up, please get him off our lawn."

Will this be the answer that we're looking for?

Maybe.  Depends upon whether or not hackers can reprogram the robot to commit crimes.  If they can, then the answer is a hard "no".  If not, then it could be useful and perhaps the civil people of a society will require fewer weapons to defend themselves.  Every new technology has its limits, and proclaiming to have solutions before exhaustive real world testing data is available is very premature.

I can tell you that I despise needing weapons to defend my family.  I would much rather spend that money on flying, but in the hierarchy of priorities self-defense always takes priority over other needs and wants.  I will not leave them undefended based upon some undelivered promise of better technology or future ways of doing things.  Boston Dynamics has a very high bar to clear to convince me, and the military as well, apparently.  I'm willing to devote public money to the study, but I'm not giving up my guns before having a crystal clear understanding of its true capabilities.  I will not accept excuses for serious failures, either.

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#84 2022-07-06 04:18:17

kbd512
Administrator
Registered: 2015-01-02
Posts: 7,362

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Scott,

I've seen good evidence that societies follow cyclical patterns, but not much evidence that they truly "evolve" into something that hasn't already existed before at some point in history.  Virtually every idea concerning social structure and governance out there has been tried at least once, if not several times before.  Most of the ideas don't work, a few work well enough to be practical, and a vanishingly small number work so well that we could claim them to be superior to other ideas.  I can only surmise that behavioralism hasn't caught on as an organizing principle for societies because it has significant flaws.  If such were not the case, then we'd see at least one successful implementation of "science based social structure", somewhere in the world.  We don't see that because no human, let alone large group of them, is entirely rational in nature.

That begs the question of what successful organizing principles actually look like.

Well here's one example:

I think we could validly claim that mostly free markets (since there are no actual laissez faire economies that function, but buyers who are willing to trade money for products or services, and companies that are mostly free to provide said products / services with certain restrictions that protect consumers- for example, no poison substituted into baby formula) works better than command economies.  There is no machine or person or small group of people who are so much more intelligent than everyone else that they know what everyone wants at all times, nor does there ever need to be for successful economic model implementations to exist.  That's why everyone uses this system, to include the communists or people who claim to be communists that other communists claim are not real communists, because even practicing communists know that their economics model is an abject failure.

We've tried infinite permutations on both systems, and what we presently have is as good as we know how to make it work in the general sense, not that it's "the most perfect possible system that ever did or will exist".  We'll always have disagreement on this point, from people with no actual evidence where some other system worked better, but their lack of evidence proves the general point.  In markets where the end result is not so heavily regulated by a central authority, you have an explosion of innovation and economic growth.  You have the opposite in markets where the regulators are allowed to stifle innovation.  Economic growth is not an end unto itself, it's a measure of our ability to experiment with new ideas and to generally improve life for rich and poor alike.  Similarly, consumption is not an end unto itself, but without the ability to consume energy / food / medicine / building materials for shelter and machinery, society stagnates or regresses.

For example, the communist system did not create mass food production using machinery or microchips or cell phones or GPS or AI-enabled robots or delivered-to-your-door products and services or medical science advances.  Instead, those morons had people waiting in line all day to buy food when they could've been doing other useful work.  None of them thought to themselves, "Well gee whiz Ivan, all humans need to eat food to continue being living communists, but not all humans need to stand in bread lines in freezing weather to get food.  Is that really what we want all of our women doing, rather than keeping them at home where they're warm, with their children, and hopefully less subject to unruly mobs or criminal assault from street thugs?  What if, and try to follow me here, we instead had a handful of bread trucks bring the bread to the women and children?  Wouldn't that be more efficient?  They'd burn less calories and need fewer loaves of bread and borscht.  The bread wouldn't rot on the shelves."  Turns out that that's what communism produced, because then they were fighting each other for scraps of food instead of against a form of governance that was failing them, because there was nothing "scientific" about murdering people or keeping them busy murdering each other, merely a display of profoundly anti-social behavior from those in power.  I guess it never occurred to them that almost nobody wouldn't be fighting their government if they had food, shelter, and basic human rights.

The Americans saw the exact same problem and thought to themselves, "Well, it be a total waste of time and money to have every last person working in the fields or standing in bread lines, but what if we can get Mr John Deere or Mr Case or Mr International Harvester over there to do more work per day than a million men and draft animals, as long as we have the fuel to do it.  Since we have plenty of diesel, I think we'll do it that way.  I reckon we're better off keeping the women at home and the children in schools, out of the fields, and letting the young men run the machines to feed everyone.  They seem to know what they're doing, they just need more powerful machines to do it.  All the labor we save can go to doctors or nurses or engineers and other professions.  Hell, I'll bet almost nobody needs to work on a farm by the time we're done.  Farming is good hard work, but plentiful food plus plentiful medicine plus plentiful new technology is better."

As a result, there's never been a serious threat or rebellion against the federal government since the Civil War.  My fellow Republicans took the Democrats' slaves away from them and told them to pick their own cotton or pay someone who would.  America didn't fall to pieces afterwards, we invented our way out of a reason, however poor, for slavery to even exist.  In about 1850, Samuel S. Rembert and Jedidiah Prescott created a mechanical cotton harvester.  By 1870, there was also a mechanical cotton stripper.  The cotton stripper cost $9 to $27 in their money, so it paid for itself many times over with every harvest.  Years later, the first John Deere cotton stripper cost $185, but yet again further improved productivity to the point where it easily paid for itself after its first use.  Around the same time, Texas A&M did genetic engineering work on cotton plants to make them more suitable for machine harvesting, more drought-resistant, and able to grow a higher quality staple.  Hemp plants and harvesting equipment were similarly improved.  We don't waste much human labor picking cotton these days, because there's no longer a good enough reason to do that.  Single cotton picking machines do more cotton picking in a day than a human could ever do in a lifetime, even if they did nothing else.  And yes, it takes a lot of energy to run those machines.  So what?  21st century humans shouldn't be picking cotton by hand.

That's the end result of the difference between central authority mandating that nearly everyone become farmers, versus the division of labor made possible through technological innovation created through the freedom to innovate.  At no point following The Great Depression was food ever scarce again in America, quite unlike Soviet Russia.  We both started with the exact same technology set, we both had brilliant technical minds, and we both lived through the ravages of multiple wars.  If your invention failed, then we moved on to the next one.  We didn't shoot the inventor or sentence him to the Gulag in Siberia because his or her invention failed.  Often times initial failures and subsequent learning form failure led to widespread success and benefit for nearly everyone.  The social and cultural changes followed the innovations, though, not the other way around.  Slavery ended when we made coal / oil / gas / machines our slaves.  People didn't suddenly "decide" to change their ideas or attitudes about where to live or what professions to pursue, the constant stream of innovation from not having everyone toil unto death to merely survive.  That permitted the move off the farms and into cities.  Your food doesn't "come from the supermarket", it comes from a hyper-efficient farm running energy-hungry machines, sun-up to sun-down.

Was America "the very first time" these ideas were tried?

No, not at all.  We're unique, but we're not that unique.  Plenty of other nations have achieved similar feats of social and technological advancement.  We're certainly not infallible, either.  However, what we have done and what we have achieved fundamentally works because it's the correct basic idea.  It can't continue to work when undermined from within by nihilist subversives.  Arguments over the minutia are largely a waste of time.  It is not possible, not even plausible, to have a century-long "accident" resulting in general prosperity and continuous standard of living improvement for everyone on the planet who does not wish to remain stuck in the Middle Ages.

It wasn't "dumb luck" that a free market system and copious quantities of energy brought billions of people out of abject poverty.  The communists started with all the same tools, better natural resources to exploit in the case of Russia and China, and yet they all fell smack on their faces when it came to innovation and improving their standards of living.  Those "evil" capitalists and Christians are the only reason most of them aren't dead.  America looked on in horror at what was happening over there, and said, "You know, maybe we ought to give them our machines and technical services before half the world's population disappears.  We may not like their governments at all, but that will never be an acceptable reason for allowing their governments to mass-murder their own people through incompetence."

MacArthur wanted to keep the Germans and Japanese impoverished and destitute, but Truman / Eisenhower / Marshall said, "The hell you will", and that was why Truman was President, Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander and then President, and Marshall was US Army Chief of Staff and then Secretary of Defense / Secretary of State, whereas General MacArthur and General Patton were relegated to commanding troops in the field, because there was no place for them outside of the Army.  The depth of thinking required to be a good commander of young men was very different than the thinking required to peer into the future to see where specific governance decisions might lead all of us.  Truman and Eisenhower and Bradley had that ability, whereas MacArthur and Patton did not.

Did that mean we needed to manipulate Patton from a young age to be more like Eisenhower or Bradley?

Absolutely not.  We needed both sorts of men, but for different purposes and points in time.  America's fight against the nazis would've been a disaster without the likes of both Patton and Bradley.  A general must understand and exploit human nature, to at least the same degree as a good basic strategy, so Patton was in the right place at the right time.  Deeper thinkers like Bradley were required for other equally important purposes, such as formulating the correct strategy.  Patton could formulate an attack, but when he failed to understand the nature of his target, well, you saw what happened in Lorraine.

While I like the idea of true science guiding human behavior, rather than theism, I've never seen a successful real-world implementation.  Most people need something supernatural to believe in, beyond what little they understand of the perfectly natural and mundane.  Even if you happened to be the correct person to lead such an effort, would your practitioners be equally adept, or would they fall back on personal beliefs and prejudices or some form of theism masquerading as science?

If your ISO-9000 behavioralism manual fails to adequately explain why people should behave in a specific way, then it's almost useless.  I wrote quick reference guides and manuals, in addition to training people to use communications equipment in the military.  If you fail to adequately explain why you should do X vs Y, then at best the user has no more knowledge than what's printed in your text, assuming they even read it, because 99% of the time they won't give it any greater thought.  That's why I placed such heavy emphasis on knowing why you were doing something, not simply what to do under some specific scenario.  It's impossible to cover all possible scenarios, which is why you need operators who possess natural curiosity, analytical minds, and critical thinking skills under stress, in order for them to have the ability to reason their way out of their specific problem.  You can read all the military strategy manuals in the world, but that won't make you an effective general officer.

So...  Show me your manual.  If you don't already have one after 20 years, or at least a draft copy, then you're not serious about developing one.  I used the communications equipment for a period of months before developing the cheat sheets and corrections to the original manuals provided by the equipment manufacturers, because if it was important enough for me to understand as a new operator, then it was equally important for others to understand.

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#85 2022-07-06 14:39:53

Scott Beach
Member
Registered: 2017-02-21
Posts: 180

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

kbd512: You wrote,

If such were not the case, then we'd see at least one successful implementation of "science based social structure", somewhere in the world.  We don't see that because no human, let alone large group of them, is entirely rational in nature.

Twin Oaks Community was established in 1967.  It started out to be a Walden Two experiment but it lost its scientific character after only 2 years of operation.  Twin Oaks still exists as an intentional community of about 120 people.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Oaks … C_Virginia

Comunidad Los Horcones has been operating for 49 years and counting.  It is the only intentional community with a science-based social structure.  The reason that Los Horcones succeeded (while Twin Oaks failed) is that the founders of Los Horcones were "behavior analysts" who knew how to engineer cultural behaviors.  They applied their behavior modification skills to themselves and to each other and they gradually built a satisfying culture and a comparatively prosperous community.

Los Horcones is located in a resource-poor desert.  And during winter nights temperatures fall below freezing.  These difficult natural conditions have forced the Los Horconans to work together to build up and maintain their community.  I therefore believe that Los Horcones is adapted to terrestrial conditions that are similar to the conditions on Mars.

If Los Horcones was suddenly transplanted to Tahiti, the culture of Los Horcones would fall apart in less than a month.  It's natural selection.  Ecosystems select sociocultural systems.


"It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints."  Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth

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#86 2022-07-28 04:12:07

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Overconfidence bolsters anti-scientific views, PSU study finds
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/959456

The critics?

Watch: How C. S. Lewis Predicted the Rise of “Scientocracy”
https://evolutionnews.org/2021/10/watch … entocracy/
“I dread government in the name of science,” C. S. Lewis wrote in 1958. “That is how tyrannies come in.” Isn’t that the truth — as we can see as clearly today as any past generation could.

Sean Johnston on Techno-Fixers
https://soundcloud.com/user-380916451/s … hno-fixers

A board game and video game thought experiment?
https://www.nationstates.net/
NationStates is a nation simulation game. Create a nation according to your political ideals and care for its people. Or deliberately oppress them. It's up to you.

Beware the Government-“Science” Complex
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articl … e-complex/

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-07-28 04:19:37)

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#87 2022-09-13 09:01:47

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

77% Of Students At One Baltimore High School Read At Elementary, Kindergarten Level
https://www.dailywire.com/news/77-of-st … rten-level

There are 69% more poor people in Russia
https://www.severreal.org/a/v-rossii-st … 97550.html

Psychologists found a “striking” difference in intelligence after examining twins raised apart in South Korea and the United States
https://www.psypost.org/2022/05/psychol … ates-63091

Taliban crashes U.S. Blackhawk chopper… New Video
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/t … opper-raw/
Mohammedan Jihadi Terrorist Taliban lost a UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter near Marshal Military Academy in Kabul. Eight people are reportedly dead.

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#88 2022-11-25 21:49:41

Scott Beach
Member
Registered: 2017-02-21
Posts: 180

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Mars_B4_Moon:

Science is a body of knowledge obtained and tested by use of the scientific method.

"Scientism is the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality."

At the present time, it is my opinion that science and the scientific method are the best way we have of sorting fact from fiction.  Can you show me a better way?  Can your "better way" be tested in an "experimental community"?

Here is an article about an experimental community designed by anthropologists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell-Peru_project


"It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints."  Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth

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#89 2022-11-25 23:34:52

kbd512
Administrator
Registered: 2015-01-02
Posts: 7,362

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Scott,

All bodies of knowledge, to include simple counting, are filtered and interpreted through human brain constructs that also involve personal beliefs, biases, and prejudices, many of them wildly incongruous with each other, thus what the measured quantity actually means is a matter of personal interpretation.

At best, science indicates where there appears to be some measure of agreement between hypothesis and observations made of the objective physical world, given current understanding of how it actually works.  The last clause in that sentence is something that few scientists seem to fully appreciate.  There's nothing immutable about science's "current understanding".

If our understanding is constantly changing, then applying constantly changing principles to something that isn't truly changing implies that we lack understanding of what we're purporting to manipulate through scientific principles.  In other words, desirable results are far from guaranteed.  You'll definitely get a result, but it may not even be useful.

If you want to know what a "better way" requires, then a "first step" towards that goal would be to stop trying to treat your fellow humans as a science experiment or puzzle for you to solve.  People and their behaviors are not math problems.  Find another toy to play with.

Mars_B4_Moon,

I see you've noted that the US indoctrination system is designed to produce people just intelligent enough to keep the machinery running for the clowns who administrate the sh!t show.

The principal of the public primary school I attended straight-up told my father in a PTA meeting that she thought all the kids were basically dumb, that there was little point to teaching them anything more than what was required to be good factory workers, and that she expected nothing more from them.  I don't remember her exact words, but that's as close to a verbatim as I can provide after 35 years of time has passed.  My parents took us to the PTA meetings and we either had to go outside and play with the other kids or wait quietly in the back.  She was very direct about it, and for whatever reason few of the other parents seemed to take much exception to what she said, or at least they didn't voice any concerns if they thought otherwise.  Shortly thereafter, we were all moved to different schools.

I was also raised by a religious family, but my mother and father viewed my questioning of religion and everything else as a sign of intelligence, rather than a sign of "being dumb" or disloyal or a "bad Christian".  They did not feel the least bit threatened by it, and actively encouraged it.  That was radically different from their own childhoods, from their descriptions of it.  However, I was still subject to the religion, which was both good and bad.  As far as fighting goes, that's all they ever did.  My takeaway was not that my home life was bad, but that any two people who have very strong feelings about how to best accomplish something worthwhile are going to fight about it, at some level or another.  Fighting for what you believe in is a natural part of being human, assuming you're not a bunch of brain-dead cult members or walking talking approximations of zombies.  At school, I fought with some kids and was friends with others.  Again, that aspect of childhood wasn't a world-ending trauma, at least to me, it was just a natural part of life.  You took your licks and so long as you kept on ticking, you won.

Rather than viewing all aspects of organized religion or organized indoctrination as "bad" or "not scientific", I had the ability to recognize parts of the American indoctrinational system (masquerading as an educational system) and Christianity and Judaism and Islamism as very pragmatic if the continuation of humanity was a desirable end goal.  I also recognized certain aspects of religion as being a hindrance to some but not all desirable outcomes.  From seeing issues from both directions, I developed a "bucket system" to throw both systems and data into, which included "nice to know, but not terribly useful" (art and artwork- which improves my life in my head but not in other quantifiable ways, fiction that entertains your brain such as starships and teleportation, the dogma of religion, conceptual ideas that have no real-world implementations or that only work in completely artificial environments), "fairly useful under most circumstances" (how to interact with others, rules-of-thumb, prioritization of tasks, how faith or religion teaches and enforces morality for those who would otherwise act in completely immoral ways without it- one of the very few ways we're different from all the rest of the animals), "only useful under very narrow circumstances" (applications of scientific principles to systems and technology), and "possibly not very useful at all" (racism, sexism, and hatred in general).

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#90 2022-11-26 10:30:43

Scott Beach
Member
Registered: 2017-02-21
Posts: 180

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

kbd512 wrote,

If you want to know what a "better way" requires, then a "first step" towards that goal would be to stop trying to treat your fellow humans as a science experiment or puzzle for you to solve.

The "fellow humans" of Los Horcones treat each other as science experiments and they are taught to do that from the age of four or five.  They are told that their parents and grandparents expect the children of Los Horcones to learn how to use behavior-shaping techniques to shape their own behaviors.  When they are older they start attending community meetings.  They discuss proposals to amend their community's bylaws.  They may authorize limited, experimental changes to the bylaws and over the course of the experiment they may receive reports about the results of the experimental changes.  If the results of the experiment are deemed desirable then they can amend the bylaws in a way that makes the experimental changes into "standard operating procedures".

The culture of Los Horcones evolves.  The Los Horconans exercise control over the evolution of their culture.  Their "cultural engineering" efforts are recorded in the minutes of their community meetings and in their bylaws.  As a corporation, they have the statutory power to adopt, amend, and repeal bylaws.

I do not treat the Los Horconans as "a science experiment or puzzle".  They treat themselves that way.  They want to have control over the evolution of their culture.


"It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints."  Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth

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#91 2022-11-26 16:36:19

kbd512
Administrator
Registered: 2015-01-02
Posts: 7,362

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Scott,

What was their culture's starting point?

What has the culture of Los Horcones evolved into?

How do they measuring progress, if indeed they're making any?

What significant indicators of "cultural success" can you point to, as it pertains to the cultural engineering aspects of Los Horconan society?

Why do you suppose it is that the cultural engineering of Los Horcones has not seen more widespread adoption elsewhere?

How many hundreds of thousands to millions of people participate in this particular form of cultural engineering, as practiced by the people of Los Horcones?

If there are not at least several hundred thousand people operating as the people of Los Horcones do, is it possible that the science experiment only produces desirable outcomes in the context of a small village with children who have been indoctrinated from childhood to behave as they do?

If the cultural engineering principles are markedly different from organized religion or the various other forms of pseudo-science humans concoct to reinforce the validity of their personal beliefs or proclivities, then I'm wondering why we don't have any adults applying the same scientific principles elsewhere, outside of Los Horcones.

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#92 2022-11-26 16:40:33

Scott Beach
Member
Registered: 2017-02-21
Posts: 180

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

kbd512 wrote,

"This is about manipulating human belief systems."
See response number 77, above.

A science-based worldview can function one of the pillars of a religion.  I am not opposed to that.  However, if a hypothesis about the origin of the universe is promoted as an unquestionable religious dogma, then I will object to that. 

I am comfortable with my incomplete scientific worldview.  But some people have a strong need for a complete explanation for the existence of life and everything else.  So they invent gods and goddesses, angels and demons, witches and warlocks, etc.

Some people believe that they are inhabited by one or more supernatural souls.  And they are taught that their souls have "free will".  I do not believe that.  Free will is a political ideology.  Free will is an explanation for human behavior that justifies a socially sanctioned system of rewards and punishment.  The operation of that system generates a "status quo" (a preferred social structure).

The Los Horconans do not teach their children to believe in supernatural souls that have free will.  They teach their children to be careful, polite, cooperative, and diligent about completing their schoolwork.  And, most significant, the children are schooled in the use of Behavior Analysis (a.k.a., Behaviorology).  These teachings are the foundation of their folkways and mores.

The Los Horconans do not burden their children with supernatural gobbledygook.  Instead, they give their children the truth.  The socialization system of Los Horcones is not "about manipulating human belief systems."

Last edited by Scott Beach (2022-11-26 16:57:35)


"It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints."  Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth

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#93 2022-11-26 17:58:48

kbd512
Administrator
Registered: 2015-01-02
Posts: 7,362

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Scott,

If this system is so successful, then why no widespread adoption?  If you can't answer that question, then you don't have much of an argument to make.  The "good idea fairy" has an endless stream of good ideas, but some are clearly more useful than others.

Is it possible that the "supernatural gobbledygook" is something that captures the human imagination and causes those who hear it to pay attention, regardless of whether or not they know or don't know that the premise or explanation is flawed?

What is "the truth" (about what, according to who, and from what perspective)?

Science has no better explanations for many things than the "god hypothesis", hence the fantastic explanations of religion that act as a substitute for a simple "I don't know".  It's a good story that a lot of people remember, even if it's completely bogus.  That's where the traditional religions "one-up" science.  Anyone can tell their child that they don't understand something, but nothing is truly learned by doing that, though.  Even the parables of religion do better than that.

Socialization systems are not about manipulating human belief systems?  You can't be serious.  The manipulation itself is not what I object to, Scott.  How is said manipulation applied, by whom and with what intentions, and to what degree?  Put another way, if this system was perverted by some evil cretin, then what's the worst that they could do to Los Horconan society?

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#94 2022-11-27 09:49:55

Scott Beach
Member
Registered: 2017-02-21
Posts: 180

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

kbd512:

Comunidad de los Horcones was founded in 1973 by a group of 7 people.  Several of those people had recently received masters and bachelors degrees in Behavior Analysis.  And some of them had recently worked with disabled children who had Downs Syndrome and autism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVRU1VEGE1M

Los Horcones now derives some of its income from teaching disabled children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO-6IqrSd2Y

Twin Oaks was founded in 1967 and it was originally intended to be a Walden Two community.  The founders of Twin Oaks did not have masters and bachelors degrees in Behavior Analysis.  A few years after its founding, Twin Oaks abandoned the goal of operating as a Walden Two community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Oaks … C_Virginia

My draft constitution of Mars reads, in part, "The laws and policies of the Government of Mars shall, to the greatest possible extent, be based on experimentally verifiable data."  In contrast, the first paragraph of the constitution of the State of California reads, "We, the People of the State of California, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, in order to secure and perpetuate its blessings, do establish this Constitution."

If you were going to write a constitution for Mars would you put "Almighty God" into the constitution?


"It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints."  Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth

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#95 2022-11-27 12:22:08

kbd512
Administrator
Registered: 2015-01-02
Posts: 7,362

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Scott,

I'm trying to figure out if you must have a master or doctorate in behavioral psychology, as well as some specific viewpoints on morality or human behavior, in order for this proposed scientocracy system of governance to function as intended.  Everyone is not going to become a behavioral psychologist, nor do I believe that behavioral psychologists would make particularly good leaders, else we would surely see more of them in government.  If the outcomes were so desirable, then why no widespread adoption?  What I think, based upon your refusal to answer the question, is that scientocracy must not function well or possibly at all without very specific education / training / belief systems, which adequately explains its extreme rarity in the marketplace of ideas.  In some ways, America is also a rarity within that marketplace, and for the same reasons.

If 51% of the people in the colony believe in a "god" or "gods", then I think the phrase "Almighty God" is going into our colony's Constitution, whether I agree with it or not.  This isn't a matter of what I agree with, it's a matter of what's most practical from the perspective of those involved and what best serves the widest possible range of colonists from their perspective rather than mine.  Some colony on Mars could adopt scientocracy while others do not, in much the same way that America has a Constitution, some other countries don't, and then there are also actual or functional theocracies, somewhat similar to our Mormon or Amish or Native American or Islamic "countries within a country", right here in America.

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#96 2023-03-04 12:43:44

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Scientocracy the scienctific government rules, is practice of basing public policies on pure 'science'. Slowly moved to India while it tries to balance a religion superstition and rich cultural past, in Sweden they obsessed with data and wanted best numbers in a constitutional monarchy.

https://scandification.com/brief-history-of-sweden/

'the Church of Sweden has been separated from the state since 2000. So they technically don’t have an official religion. '

It’s worth noting however that Sweden isn’t a country that is majorly influenced by religion. In fact, research suggests that less than one in five Swedes are religious at all.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sci … man-nature
,
https://books.google.com/books?id=AHFkA … ientocracy

and islamo thought?

Dozens more Iranian schoolgirls taken to hospital after suspected poisonings

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ … poisonings

Crazy Islamist attacking the sinner Atheist / Atheism infidel?

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#97 2024-02-20 13:30:28

Scott Beach
Member
Registered: 2017-02-21
Posts: 180

Re: A Constitution of Mars; Scientocracy

Some of the colonies that eventually became the United States of America were theocracies, and they had significant religious differences.  They were able to put aside their religious differences and join together to form the USA.  To protect themselves from religious persecution, they prohibited their federal government from establishing religious beliefs and practices.

   First Amendment to the United States Constitution; "Congress shall make no law respecting an
   establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

We might emulate this example by permitting the establishment of religious communities on Mars (i.e., Christian communities, Moslem communities, Jewish communities, Hindu communities, Buddhist communities) and secular communities and experimental communities etc.

I have drafted an "Agreement" for an experimental community...

DRAFT  Agreement to Plan and Establish an Experimental Community on Mars

We, the parties to this Agreement, will plan and establish an experimental community on Mars.  The name of the community shall be Scientia Three.

The rules and policies of Scientia Three shall, to the greatest possible extent, be based on experimentally verifiable data.  Scientia Three may be described as a scientocracy.

   "Scientocracy is the practice of basing public policies on science". 
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientocracy
   Learning from Experimental Communities Using Behavioral Systems Analysis,
   https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 … 19-00005-y

We recall the words of Henry David Thoreau.  He wrote, “That government is best which governs least”.  Thoreau’s statement shall be the motto of Scientia Three.

We shall establish an office that maintains records about all Martian communities.  The office shall be known as the Ethnographic Research Registry.

Scientia Three and other Martian communities may establish a federation of Martian communities.
   https://www.amazon.com/Sovereign-Mars-T … 0700633901

This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Nevada.
   https://contracts.justia.com/contract-c … rning-law/
   https://www.leg.state.nv.us/NRS/NRS-081 … S081Sec755

Last edited by Scott Beach (2024-02-21 09:10:58)


"It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints."  Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth

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