We can already tell when powerful people simply do bad things, express bad intentions, or get caught in lies… it seems like there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick up there before we resort to mind reading, and I strongly suspect that the reasons for that will apply just as well to this use of mind-reading tech.
Big difference between telling when they lie, and telling when they get caught lying?
I think people who get caught lying to or expressing bad intentions towards, the base they rely on for support, before they run for office, typically are not elected. Curious if you have counterexamples. Especially clear counterexamples that aren’t easy to rationalize away (which direct lies under mind-reading people trust would definitely not be)
Maybe the most important point is, the way I see mind-reading helping, is not necessarily that there are a bunch of immediate problems with the people in power, and we’d replace those with better people, and this would make a huge difference (although I think it would make a big difference). Its more that we’ve had to build in a bunch of limitations, complexity, and intentional slowness/redundancy/inefficiency/weakness, into our current governance structure, to make it robust to liars and people with bad intentions, and to make it able to operate without all that much trust. And if those constraints were lifted, we could build much better governance entirely. Like, if a dirt-cheap and flexible method of teleportation was invented, the main benefit would not come from having planes fly into a portal after liftoff, cutting berkeley → paris by 11 hours. We would no longer need planes, or roads, or ships. And 10 years later we’d be halfway to a sci-fi utopia, having solved material scarcity, climate change, and having started terraforming the moon.
We can already tell when powerful people simply do bad things, express bad intentions, or get caught in lies… it seems like there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick up there before we resort to mind reading, and I strongly suspect that the reasons for that will apply just as well to this use of mind-reading tech.
Big difference between telling when they lie, and telling when they get caught lying?
I think people who get caught lying to or expressing bad intentions towards, the base they rely on for support, before they run for office, typically are not elected. Curious if you have counterexamples. Especially clear counterexamples that aren’t easy to rationalize away (which direct lies under mind-reading people trust would definitely not be)
Maybe the most important point is, the way I see mind-reading helping, is not necessarily that there are a bunch of immediate problems with the people in power, and we’d replace those with better people, and this would make a huge difference (although I think it would make a big difference). Its more that we’ve had to build in a bunch of limitations, complexity, and intentional slowness/redundancy/inefficiency/weakness, into our current governance structure, to make it robust to liars and people with bad intentions, and to make it able to operate without all that much trust. And if those constraints were lifted, we could build much better governance entirely. Like, if a dirt-cheap and flexible method of teleportation was invented, the main benefit would not come from having planes fly into a portal after liftoff, cutting berkeley → paris by 11 hours. We would no longer need planes, or roads, or ships. And 10 years later we’d be halfway to a sci-fi utopia, having solved material scarcity, climate change, and having started terraforming the moon.