Reflecting on the vastness of time in which extraterrestrial life could have reached the earth, the physicist Enrico Fermi wondered, “Where are they?” One of the most plausible explanations of the absence of such extraterrestrial visits is also one of the most disquieting. It is intrinsic to the nature of intelligent life to expand knowledge […]
Author Archive | Prof. John McGinnis (Northwestern), guest-blogging
Rights and Consequences
My blog post, “Experimenting in Same-Sex Marriage and Other Matters,” raised questions about the relation between rights and consequences. Some commentators thought I was arguing that constitutional rights should be curbed if they had some bad consequences. I think this was based on misunderstanding of my position. It true that I think the determining what […]
Promoting Limited Government and More Informed Decision Making
Thanks so much to Ilya for his generous post on Accelerating Democracy. I see Ilya’s and my projects not as antagonistic but essentially complementary. I share Ilya’s belief that more limited government is likely better government. I thus expect that that by providing more accurate information about policy results, more people will move over time […]
Combating Bias: More Reason to Favor Prediction Markets and Oppose Earmarks
The information delivered by new technologies about policy results will be more effective insofar as it changes people’s minds. But many people are biased. They hold to their preconceptions about the wisdom of policy, regardless of the new evidence presented. Thus, another urgent task for adapting to technological acceleration is to help democracy better update […]
Prediction Markets and the Danger of Manipulation
The most frequent critique of my proposal to legalize prediction markets stemmed from fear of manipulation or gaming. A specific concern is that manipulators will choose to skew the markets at the time of some democratic event, such as a vote in Congress. For instance, those who stand to gain from a President’s stimulus package […]
Experimenting in Same-Sex Marriage and Other Matters
We live in a golden age for empiricism. Pythagoras said the world is made up of numbers and that is the slogan of empiricists. But until this time of big data and exponential computer power, empiricism had an Achilles heel, because it lacked substantial processing capacity. Fortunately, the relentless increase in computational power and the […]
Legalize Prediction Markets Now!
I do not want to shock readers of the blog, but Washington is a spin city where many politicians and pundits say a policy will deliver a set of results without really believing it. It would be very beneficial to counter this band of dissemblers with an army of people focused on the accuracy of […]
Introducing My New Book, Accelerating Democracy
Relentless and accelerating technological change is the fundamental fact of our time. Your smartphone today is more than a thousand times powerful and a million times less expensive than all the computers at MIT in 1965. This exponential increase in computational power is continuing. It represents both a boon and a danger to society. Such […]