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0 pointsMicroBerto10y ago0 comments

Of course it's not perfect. But when something we're proposing has once resulted in total catastrophe (complete end of civilization), it's worth researching a hell of a lot more.

This is why I feel any democracy is eventually doomed to fail. People will vote themselves more and more free stuff, but "free stuff" ultimately defeats the will of the human spirit.

It's worth researching more, but everybody just seems to focus on the economic impact and not the social one. If you think this will end crime, then I have a bridge to sell to you.

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dragonwriter10y ago

> But when something we're proposing has once resulted in total catastrophe (complete end of civilization),

In order for it to have resulted in a "complete end of civilization", you'd have to have first actually created a mouse civilization. Which would, actually, have been a more interesting result.

And in order for it to say anything about UBI, it would have to actually be in some way analogous to what UBI provides. Which, it isn't. Even aside from the fact that mice are not humans (they are occasionally good models for humans biochemically, but basically never good models when it comes to politico-economic behavior.)

> If you think this will end crime, then I have a bridge to sell to you.

I don't think it will end crime. I don't think it needs to end crime to be a good thing. (OTOH, it can substantially increase the expected marginal disutility of defection from social norms that results in incarceration -- especially when the perpetrator is relatively poor -- which should reduce the rate of economically-motivated crimes committed by relative sane people, which is a significant chunk of crime, but very far from all of it.)