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What do you even need a government (with a benevolent leader at the top) for, if you don't have any bad actors?



You can still gain efficiency by centralising services. If you have centralised services you need some mechanism to coordinate them and make decisions about how they should work, and those decisions should ideally take input from the people using the services. Even in a no-bad-actors world you still have many different competing interests to balance due to different people's needs and preferences, so you probably want some kind of polling/citizens forum/whatever to gather input for making decisions, and an organisation that looks at all the details and makes the decisions on behalf of the collective.

Or by example: You still want someone to organise weekly garbage collection efficiently and equitably. The government does that.


Regular private companies work pretty well for coordinating and providing paid for services. Especially something like garbage collection.

Of course, details depend for example on what our 'no bad actor' assumption actually means, and perhaps on what ideas you have about human nature and history.

> Even in a no-bad-actors world you still have many different competing interests to balance due to different people's needs and preferences, so you probably want some kind of polling/citizens forum/whatever to gather input for making decisions, and an organisation that looks at all the details and makes the decisions on behalf of the collective.

Yes, you'll want some kind of organisation. My comment was just that the organisation would probably not look like a monarchy, benevolent or otherwise.


Like, if I'm starving and must kill you to survive, am I bad actor (If we split the food, we both die)?

There's no such thing as bad actors. Just people who's interests are not aligned to yours (you are their "bad actor")


That's one very specific definition of 'bad actor'. Other definitions are possible, and probably what the original commenter had in mind.

Have a look at eg https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tJQsxD34maYw2g5E4/thomas-c-s... or https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2SeN2MjmMzZB25hBo/insights-f... for some ideas about alternative definitions.

You could also go by something like 'You are not a bad actor, if (outside of emergencies) you don't lie, cheat, murder or steal.' Or you can go with something closer to game theory, and emphasis cooperation in something like a prisoner dilemma.




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