> To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. (Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)
Growing up on a diet of HHGTTG and Discworld just made me intrinsically distrust power in all it's forms.
Many (most?) politicians were traditionally (at least partly) motivated by public service, so we perhaps should consider how to reinvigorate and reinforce that.
One possibility might be to specifically improve pathways into politics from sectors that still have high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education.
There are likely plenty of other approaches to help balance out the pure power-seekers too, so let's work out what they are and follow as many as possible rather than encouraging fatalism.
> high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education.
Many of these are mostly known for harbouring activists, not public servants. They serve a cause, not the public and as such are just as unsuitable for politics as the usual suspects.
How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? (And who would decide which Cincinnatus to call for setting up this year's budget ?)
Even when people mention "randomly picking up people" ("stochiocracy") I assumed you could refuse :D
Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light.
For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc.
So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse.
Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher).
So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.
>How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ?
A government. All governments are coercive and premised on a few powerful elites maintaining and exercising their power with a monopoly on violence[0].
Yes, even the "good" ones. At the end of the day government, like war, is a racket.
In many ways, having a king was a lot better than having a bunch of people bickering among themselves without getting stuff done. At least the king was kinda tied to the country and thus the interest of the country was part self-interest.
think about it how do people become aristocrats if not exactly by the mechanisms which make them least suited to rule given the comments argument?
Also one very common case of people being drawn to power but not suited for it if people which grew up with disposition that having that power is their "birthright" or similar. Such a disposition means from their POV losing the power, even if its due to them acting incompetent or misusing it, is no different then theft or worse "rebellion" and in turn they tend to be very willing to use a lot of violence and cruelty to keep it.
so it's really an argument against any form of government which (in it's most common ways) involves people "sizing" power and tending to at least somewhat pass it forward through generations. And aristocracy in how it normally is practiced definitely falls under that.
if anything it's an argument in favor of democracy, just with a lot of added rules against populism, spreading of misinformation, systematically railing up people, qualifications needed to get a position of power etc.
anyway if we don't fix modern attention economics being a perfect mechanism to propagate propaganda, misinformation and hate content we will not be getting there and any current attempts to fix this seem fairly limited in effect
> People least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it.
In the current system.*
There are systems that allow you to distribute power more equally. It requires a different setup, like for example randomised choice. The people in power don't like it. It's much easier to bribe 2-3 career politicians and guarantee their success.
It makes sense because anyone with experience, ability, and noble goals will give up before they start because it is too difficult. Linus Torvalds said he wouldn't have started Linux if he'd know how difficult it would be (paraphrasing here). So we are left with either people with noble goals, but either no experience or ability, or people with ability and experience, but without noble goals (what we have currently in the US).
But let's not despair. We are better off than centuries ago. The consciousness that people are not there to be ruled does not happen over night. Our civilization is just getting started. A republic if you can keep it.
There is a middle ground. This kind of fatalism makes people not want to try.
I think we have made political office and running for it so insanely adversarial and toxic that only three kinds of people will dare sign up for it: narcissists, crooks, and ideologues who think they are on a crusade. (The latter includes a variety of religions and ideologies.)
Competent sane well balanced people with reasonable balanced views of things like ideologies or for whom religion is more personal and spiritual? No way they’d go near it.
People with some of these negative characteristics, like narcissism, but who are also very competent? They can make more money and get often as much prestige in business. So we don’t even get competent narcissists.
Why is it so toxic? The media, the process, and us. The media and the people absolutely roast anyone running, and the winner take all process encourages a brutal slug fest.
Other countries don’t have it as bad. We could start by asking what they do differently.
Not being pure winner take all is one big one. They allow coalitions. That encourages alliances and dialogue. It also limits below the belt attacks since you might have to work hand in hand with these people, so you better not trash them too badly.
I think we're all overly wound up. Recently I find my adversarial tactics too frequently misfiring against people and ideas that, in hindsight, probably did not have explicit ill-intent. The reality is that other people, even those at the top, as individuals, are not as misaligned with you as you think. Your interests only conflict by a moderate amount. What's actually extremely misaligned with you are the superorganisms they are a part of. This doesn't mean we should absolve individuals of responsibility and consequences, since that would create the wrong incentives. But it's worth noting that while they may seem in control, even the dictator Kim Jong Un lacks the ability to single-handedly undo the authoritarian system in North Korea, even if he has a sudden change of heart. The moment he tries is the moment he gets replaced by someone else. Dismantling these systems, or preventing them from being built in the first place, will take more than finger-pointing ideological battle.
I share your view, it's a discussion I commonly have with friends who are too blinded by individuals' actions instead of the systems that these individuals are part of, and from which those actions come from a series of rational but misplaced intermediary steps.
No single individual is controlling what their peer group does but by being a part of it those actions compound. Like you said, not even the most brutal dictatorships take actions single-handedly decided by someone, it's all part and parcel of the system they decided to (or ended up at) participate.
I think Byung-Chul Han hit the right spot when talking about "shitstorms" on "In The Swarm". Societies after the digital age got too narrowly focused on explosive bursts of outrage against individuals, instead of discussing more in-depth the issues that create systems these individuals live and navigate, and eventually take actions that are immoral, unjust, evil, etc. from the incentives of their environment, we only discuss things in binary terms (acceptable/transgressive), focused on the performative act of a monologue of outrage, without solidarity but with solitude, in our screens.
I've had this feeling for more than a decade, reading Byung-Chul Han so eloquently describe many observations and feelings I've had was refreshing for my own psyche. It's just extremely hard to try to instill some of these concepts unto others...
We may have to guide others to derive these concepts themselves in the same way we did rather than instilling the conclusion. I don't know how to do that yet, so for the time being, I just describe the problem.
Alternative take: education makes you a lot more efficient at exploiting people.
It is not education that is at the root of these things, but incentives. If the incentives are all wrong, so will be the outcomes. Take education as an institution. The way it is set up incentivizes cheating, and so nearly everyone tries to cheat.
Education makes you more efficient at exploiting people, but it also makes you more efficient at detecting and resisting the exploits. While no one is immune to it because the most effective kinds of exploitation are emotional rather than rational (see both religion and populism,) a solid educational foundation by the public makes it more difficult for the elites - who will by definition always be educated - to manipulate the public.
I feel like you're just arguing around education being an issue. When people cheat at their education, the outcome is they aren't educated. They can't practice critical thinking without a framework for understanding the world and so all they have is unfocused cynicism, which social media is designed to readily exploit.
Why is this hyperbolic, bitter far-left political activism from "Paris Marx" on the front page?
Marx is a hack who latches onto well-known figures like Musk (well known because they actually achieved stuff), and attacks them for cheap eyeballs-on-content and book sales. It's pure parasitism. Attention arbitrage.
Ironic that an anti-capitalist like Marx is so obviously hawking his book. Such irony is common among far-left agitators. They're capitalists when it suits them. They just don't tolerate anyone else being capitalist.
That's about as "ironic" as you writing words even though you didn't like some other words. Seems like you disagree with words only when it suits you!
Or rather, it would be, if you weren't so completely off the mark about what a capitalist is... such as "an investor of capital in business, especially one having a major financial interest in an important enterprise." Writing a book isn't being a capitalist, buying the rights to a book to make more money off it would be.
People least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it.
We are forever doomed to be ruled by those worse than us, for the simple reason that reasonable people don't seek power.
> To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. (Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)
Growing up on a diet of HHGTTG and Discworld just made me intrinsically distrust power in all it's forms.
Many (most?) politicians were traditionally (at least partly) motivated by public service, so we perhaps should consider how to reinvigorate and reinforce that.
One possibility might be to specifically improve pathways into politics from sectors that still have high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education.
There are likely plenty of other approaches to help balance out the pure power-seekers too, so let's work out what they are and follow as many as possible rather than encouraging fatalism.
> high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education.
Many of these are mostly known for harbouring activists, not public servants. They serve a cause, not the public and as such are just as unsuitable for politics as the usual suspects.
How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? (And who would decide which Cincinnatus to call for setting up this year's budget ?)
Even when people mention "randomly picking up people" ("stochiocracy") I assumed you could refuse :D
Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light.
For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc.
So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse.
Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher).
So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.
We have a system that does that. That’s how we do jury duty. We use sortition to decide important things every day
That's not how it was usually run, but say in Ancient Athen's the council that decided was whoever was at the council at that time.
>How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ?
A government. All governments are coercive and premised on a few powerful elites maintaining and exercising their power with a monopoly on violence[0].
Yes, even the "good" ones. At the end of the day government, like war, is a racket.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
In many ways, having a king was a lot better than having a bunch of people bickering among themselves without getting stuff done. At least the king was kinda tied to the country and thus the interest of the country was part self-interest.
We are forever doomed to beg on our knees to be ruled in general
no it's just a "good times creates weak men" sort of thing.
Once you're back to hard times you'll have a whole crop of reasonable people willing to wrestle power at the cost of their lives.
Sounds like an argument for aristocracy.
Or a fair die roll.
against it, it's an argument against aristocracy
think about it how do people become aristocrats if not exactly by the mechanisms which make them least suited to rule given the comments argument?
Also one very common case of people being drawn to power but not suited for it if people which grew up with disposition that having that power is their "birthright" or similar. Such a disposition means from their POV losing the power, even if its due to them acting incompetent or misusing it, is no different then theft or worse "rebellion" and in turn they tend to be very willing to use a lot of violence and cruelty to keep it.
so it's really an argument against any form of government which (in it's most common ways) involves people "sizing" power and tending to at least somewhat pass it forward through generations. And aristocracy in how it normally is practiced definitely falls under that.
if anything it's an argument in favor of democracy, just with a lot of added rules against populism, spreading of misinformation, systematically railing up people, qualifications needed to get a position of power etc.
anyway if we don't fix modern attention economics being a perfect mechanism to propagate propaganda, misinformation and hate content we will not be getting there and any current attempts to fix this seem fairly limited in effect
> People least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it.
In the current system.*
There are systems that allow you to distribute power more equally. It requires a different setup, like for example randomised choice. The people in power don't like it. It's much easier to bribe 2-3 career politicians and guarantee their success.
The golden path I dream of has ASI replacing human-run governments
It makes sense because anyone with experience, ability, and noble goals will give up before they start because it is too difficult. Linus Torvalds said he wouldn't have started Linux if he'd know how difficult it would be (paraphrasing here). So we are left with either people with noble goals, but either no experience or ability, or people with ability and experience, but without noble goals (what we have currently in the US).
But let's not despair. We are better off than centuries ago. The consciousness that people are not there to be ruled does not happen over night. Our civilization is just getting started. A republic if you can keep it.
There is a middle ground. This kind of fatalism makes people not want to try.
I think we have made political office and running for it so insanely adversarial and toxic that only three kinds of people will dare sign up for it: narcissists, crooks, and ideologues who think they are on a crusade. (The latter includes a variety of religions and ideologies.)
Competent sane well balanced people with reasonable balanced views of things like ideologies or for whom religion is more personal and spiritual? No way they’d go near it.
People with some of these negative characteristics, like narcissism, but who are also very competent? They can make more money and get often as much prestige in business. So we don’t even get competent narcissists.
Why is it so toxic? The media, the process, and us. The media and the people absolutely roast anyone running, and the winner take all process encourages a brutal slug fest.
Other countries don’t have it as bad. We could start by asking what they do differently.
Not being pure winner take all is one big one. They allow coalitions. That encourages alliances and dialogue. It also limits below the belt attacks since you might have to work hand in hand with these people, so you better not trash them too badly.
Eh, I prefer to lean on the less dramatic Peter principle.
Flagged already, but I'll put this here anyway.
The root problem is much bigger than the big tech companies or the people running them, as I explain in this past comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354
I think we're all overly wound up. Recently I find my adversarial tactics too frequently misfiring against people and ideas that, in hindsight, probably did not have explicit ill-intent. The reality is that other people, even those at the top, as individuals, are not as misaligned with you as you think. Your interests only conflict by a moderate amount. What's actually extremely misaligned with you are the superorganisms they are a part of. This doesn't mean we should absolve individuals of responsibility and consequences, since that would create the wrong incentives. But it's worth noting that while they may seem in control, even the dictator Kim Jong Un lacks the ability to single-handedly undo the authoritarian system in North Korea, even if he has a sudden change of heart. The moment he tries is the moment he gets replaced by someone else. Dismantling these systems, or preventing them from being built in the first place, will take more than finger-pointing ideological battle.
I share your view, it's a discussion I commonly have with friends who are too blinded by individuals' actions instead of the systems that these individuals are part of, and from which those actions come from a series of rational but misplaced intermediary steps.
No single individual is controlling what their peer group does but by being a part of it those actions compound. Like you said, not even the most brutal dictatorships take actions single-handedly decided by someone, it's all part and parcel of the system they decided to (or ended up at) participate.
I think Byung-Chul Han hit the right spot when talking about "shitstorms" on "In The Swarm". Societies after the digital age got too narrowly focused on explosive bursts of outrage against individuals, instead of discussing more in-depth the issues that create systems these individuals live and navigate, and eventually take actions that are immoral, unjust, evil, etc. from the incentives of their environment, we only discuss things in binary terms (acceptable/transgressive), focused on the performative act of a monologue of outrage, without solidarity but with solitude, in our screens.
I've had this feeling for more than a decade, reading Byung-Chul Han so eloquently describe many observations and feelings I've had was refreshing for my own psyche. It's just extremely hard to try to instill some of these concepts unto others...
We may have to guide others to derive these concepts themselves in the same way we did rather than instilling the conclusion. I don't know how to do that yet, so for the time being, I just describe the problem.
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The only way to have a better democracy is to have better people.
Education is the entire slow, painful game.
Alternative take: education makes you a lot more efficient at exploiting people.
It is not education that is at the root of these things, but incentives. If the incentives are all wrong, so will be the outcomes. Take education as an institution. The way it is set up incentivizes cheating, and so nearly everyone tries to cheat.
Education makes you more efficient at exploiting people, but it also makes you more efficient at detecting and resisting the exploits. While no one is immune to it because the most effective kinds of exploitation are emotional rather than rational (see both religion and populism,) a solid educational foundation by the public makes it more difficult for the elites - who will by definition always be educated - to manipulate the public.
I feel like you're just arguing around education being an issue. When people cheat at their education, the outcome is they aren't educated. They can't practice critical thinking without a framework for understanding the world and so all they have is unfocused cynicism, which social media is designed to readily exploit.
Why is this hyperbolic, bitter far-left political activism from "Paris Marx" on the front page?
Marx is a hack who latches onto well-known figures like Musk (well known because they actually achieved stuff), and attacks them for cheap eyeballs-on-content and book sales. It's pure parasitism. Attention arbitrage.
Ironic that an anti-capitalist like Marx is so obviously hawking his book. Such irony is common among far-left agitators. They're capitalists when it suits them. They just don't tolerate anyone else being capitalist.
That's about as "ironic" as you writing words even though you didn't like some other words. Seems like you disagree with words only when it suits you!
Or rather, it would be, if you weren't so completely off the mark about what a capitalist is... such as "an investor of capital in business, especially one having a major financial interest in an important enterprise." Writing a book isn't being a capitalist, buying the rights to a book to make more money off it would be.
That's correct. Musk et al have actually done nothing worthy of criticism and these whiners are just jealous of their richness /s
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