Multiheaded comments on New censorship: against hypothetical violence against identifiable people - Less Wrong
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I think that there's the usual paradox of benevolent dictatorship here; you can only trust humans who clearly don't seek this position for selfish ends and aren't likely to present a rational/benevolent front just so you would give them political power.
In a liberal/democratic political atmosphere, self-proclaimed benevolent dictators are a rare and prized resource; you can pressure one to run a website, an organization, etc to the best of their ability. But if dictatorship were to be seen as the norm, and you couldn't easily fall back on democracy, rule by committee, anarchy, etc, and had to choose between a few dictators, then the standards of dictatorial control would surely plummet and it would be psychologically much more difficult to change the form of organization. So, IMO, isolated experiments with dictatorship are fine; overall preference for it is terribly dangerous.
(All of the above goes only for humans, of course; I have no qualms about FAI rule.)
P.S.: I googled for "benevolent dictator" + "paradox" and found an argument similar to mine.
Interesting. Do you think there are dictator-selection procedures that don't have either set of failure modes (selecting for looks/promises to loot the commons/lack of leadership, selecting for power-hungry tyrants)?
Only a single one: a great actually-benevolent-dictator, with a good insight into people and lots of rationality, personally selects his successor among several candidates, after lengthy consideration and hidden testing. But, of course, remove one of the above qualifiers, and it can blow up regardless of the first dictator's best intentions. See e.g. Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. So, on a meta level, no, there's likely no system that would work for humans.
(I think that "real" democracy is also too dangerous - see the 19th and early 20th century - so either some form of sophisticated rule by committee or a state of anarchy could be the safest option for baseline humanity.)
What about technocracy a-la china?
And FAI, obviously.
Really? Safe in the sense of "too incompetent to execute a mass-murder"? Also, anarchy is a military vacuum.