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Notes -
It's an interesting Eliezer post to raise...
I think the key thing that's sort of hinted at is that governments and institutions are not things that are for self-improving and optimizing towards clear goals from the point of view of well-intentioned people who live within them. Govts are their own kind of living thing and they live or die by the sword, by fire and famine and civil war. Not rational argument. How would it be if my muscle cells could protest if I was getting them killed? Traitors (cancer) will be shot!
If anyone could just easily change a system to optimize it, these govts would be like animals without an immune system. They'd immediately get eaten by something that does have an immune system. You want a nice garden but instead you get a whole lot of ants that eat the beautiful plants and then insects that eat ants, then bigger insects, then birds, then cats and eventually some ugly hyena that seems like it should be extinct (Approximately 60% of cubs die during birth, primarily from suffocation). But no, the hyena is good enough! They just cram out more kids, the kids kill eachother, survival of the fittest - species of Least Concern regarding extinction.
The USA is not powerful because it is well-run! The US is run pretty badly but America's other strengths in size and wealth production are so great that it can compensate for this. US governance failures, of which randomly poisoning children barely rank in the top 100, fail to inflict severe enough damage to break the wealth creating machine. And so the show goes on.
Trillions down the drain on that alone. But unless the PLA march into Washington or the US fails to pay its soldiers and security forces, the show goes on!
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