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ROUGH_HEWN

                                             December 29, 2009

Why would I care about
anything like this?

    DEATH_SCENES


The fundamental need is not for public
intellectuals (presuming you're not
trying to make a living as one).

What we need is collective intelligence,
the ability for society as a whole to converge
on an understanding of difficult issues
and to solve difficult problems.                     Actually, the
                                                     one may not be
                                                     a requirement
                                                     for the other.

   Try to list the components of
   social mechanisms, the dials,
   levers, knobs and indicators that
   can be stuck together into some
   sort of functional structure:

   markets
     businesses

   elections
      representatives
      direct decisions

   appointed positions
      "staff", "bureaucrats"

   royalty
      inheritence
      conquest             (two kinds of
                            "blood")

   volunteers


We expect to be able to put these pieces together
into systems that will (roughly) function...

   governments, ala the US government.


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