56 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
56 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
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Alternative Institutions Mailing List
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You are invited to join "AltInst", an email list on Alternative
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Institutions. AltInst is solely for proposing and critiquing alternative
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institutions for various walks of life. Alternatives ways to run
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conversations, countries, households, markets, offices, romances, schools,
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etc. are all fair game.
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AltInst is open to folks from any political persuasion, but general
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political flaming/discussion is forbidden. Skip the theory and just tell
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us your vision of how something could be different, and how that would
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work. Many of us are truly excited to hear about creative well-considered
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suggestions, no matter what the source, but quickly bored by both
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ideological is-to-is-not flaming, and partisan rah-rahs for anything
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"politically correct" in some camp.
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Each post starting a new AltInst thread should describe an alternative
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institution, giving specifics about how it would work. You can post your
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own ideas, or review (and reference) the suggestions of others. You need
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not endorse these ideas, and they need not be immediately practical, but
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you should think them worth considering.
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Replies can ask for more detail on the mechanism, how it is envisioned to
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handle specific cases, or how it is different from specific alternatives.
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Followup discussion may also suggest difficult but plausible scenarios to
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see how well the proposed mechanism can handle them. If, however, someone
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has declared their proposal to be an attempt to achieve certain goals, it
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is inappropriate to question whether those are goals worth having.
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To set a context, folks may also give SHORT descriptions of the existing
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institutions that alternatives are intended to replace, of current problems
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with those institutions, and a diagnosis of their root causes. And folks
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may give SHORT summaries of evidence regarding an institution's
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feasibility, such as similar institutions in use at other times and places,
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laboratory or field experiments, or abstract models.
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But your tone must remain civil, and we are wary of letting the
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conversation slip into general debate on politics or economics; the list
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administrator reserves the right to step in and say "that's enough".
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AltInst is mainly for finding out about novel suggestions; political debate
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can be done elsewhere.
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To join (or quit) AltInst, send a request to:
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AltInst-request@cco.caltech.edu
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and wait up to two business days. AltInst posts may specify how their
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distribution is to be limited, but if they don't, AltInst posts are
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public and may be freely distributed or archived.
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AltInst List Administrator, Robin Hanson
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