Brian Armstrong: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let’s say we had the potential to settle Mars. We had the technology, and 5,000 people would go. What principles would we use for choosing which people? And what kinds of rules or governing structure should they live under? Let’s say it’s more or less self-sustaining when they get there. Solar power works, there’s some other source of energy, they’re not completely dependent on us, and they’re going to make their own way, 5,000 people. Do they all come from one country? Is it all young people? A lot of old people? How do you do it? My first reaction is, why don’t we let the market decide who wants to buy a ticket, who wants to go there. The market is good, as you’ve written about in other contexts — vaccines and all kinds of things. The market is good at sending the information, transmitting it through prices. I like the idea of letting the market decide. In terms of what governance system they would live under, I think there are some really interesting ideas about how to make the next version of democracy because democracy was such a breakthrough, but it has some issues that are cropping up here and there that people are thinking about how to improve on it. For instance, we have this accumulation of laws in the US, and people make these analogies to tech debt and software. I think the IRS or the tax legal code is 150,000 pages or something at this point. It only grows. One interesting idea for democracies is that you put a sunset clause in every law, where after 4 or 8 or 10 years or something, unless people actively go to reinitiate it, it sunsets and goes away. It might be interesting to have other ways to keep the amount of bureaucracy and overhead low. It takes two-thirds to add a new law, but it takes only 50 percent or less to remove a law. I also think that a lot of laws — they have these issues where people want to add in all these additional special interest things to get the votes, to get it approved. You get these laws that are thousands of pages. They have all these special interests inserted. But if you had some rule that was, every law should only be two pages maximum, otherwise it can’t be a law, you break it down into these smaller chunks that would be, actually, the law itself, and not these massive things that people didn’t read before they voted on. I don’t know. I’m not an expert on this, but there are lots of ideas about how we could probably iterate on democracy, and Mars might be an opportunity to do that. If you could do one thing to accelerate progress in science, what would it be?…

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