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ArisKatsaris comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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My own view: Dictators in countries tend to cause bad consequences. Dictators in forums tend to cause good consequences.
I'd like to point out that Overcoming Bias, back in the day, was a dictatorship: Robin and Eliezer were explicitly in total control. Whereas Less Wrong was explictly set up to be community-moderated, with voting taking the place of moderator censorship. And the general consensus has always been that LW was an improvement over OB.
Do you have any evidence for that ? In my experience, it all depends on the dictator, not on the venue.
It's easier to leave a forum than a country. Forum-dictators who abuse their power end up with empty forums.
Real world dictators who abuse their power often end up dead. (But perhaps not as much as real world dictators who do not abuse their power enough to secure it.)
Not as often as you seem to think.
Perhaps I misunderstood what ArisKatsaris was saying. I thought he meant something like this:
If this is true, your objection is somewhat tangential to the topic (though an empty forum is less desirable than an active one). But perhaps he meant something else ?
Since it's easier to leave, a dictator in a forum has more motivation not to abuse his power.
Just my own personal experience of how moderated vs non-moderated forums tend to go, and as for countries, likewise my impression of what countries seem nice to live in.
You're probably right about modern countries; however, as far as I understand, historically some countries did reasonably well under a dictatorship. Life under Hammurabi was far from being all peaches and cream, but it was still relatively prosperous, compared to the surrounding nations. A few Caesars did a pretty good job of administering Rome; of course, their successors royally screwed the whole thing up. Likewise, life in Tzarist Russia went through its ups and downs (mostly downs, to be fair).
Unfortunately, the kind of a person who seeks (and is able to achieve) absolute power is usually exactly the kind of person who should be kept away from power if at all possible. I've seen this happen in forums, where the unofficial grounds for banning a user inevitably devolve into "he doesn't agree with me", and "I don't like his face, virtually speaking".
"Dictators" in forums can't kill people or hold them hostage.
Right, but that doesn't mean they tend to be beneficial, either. We're not arguing over which dictator is the worst, but whether dictators in forums are diametrically opposed to their real-world cousins.