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Moss_Piglet comments on The best 15 words - Less Wrong
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That's not exactly true; there is one particular culture which benefits very greatly from every Leftist alliance; the culture of Leftist intellectuals.
The Palestinians do not benefit from the "Peace Process" which keeps them in refugee camps, and neither does Israel or any of Israel's Arab neighbors or even the United States which keeps the scam going. But it does provide an enormous amount of jobs for smart progressive kids working in the UN and other NGOs, juicy materials for journalists and political pundits, a great laboratory for PoliSci academics connected to the State Department to test their pet theories, and the crisis itself is an excellent propaganda tool for anyone to the left of Mussolini to use on any pet issue they might have.
In other words, the Cathedral itself profits, even if (especially if) everyone else is losing money. That's not a healthy business model, in fact it's almost criminal.
but doesn't that just class "Leftist Intellectuals" as one among many groups who use power to serve their own interests, while outwardly appealing to high moral ideals?
What's different here from all the other Fnargles who seize power? Why should I take any particular notice of this particular group of Fnargles who fall under the heading "Leftist Intellectuals"? Why is this Universe worse than the Universe that would result if there were no "leftist intellectuals"?
Are "leftist intellectuals" somehow meaner and more destructive than other Fnargles? Or is it simply that this brand of Fnargle is really, really good at re-directing power to itself?
Yes and yes, and the reason for both is how they take power.
Nearly every ruler, and virtually every ruling class, in history has built their power by skimming off of the top; tithes are one of the oldest non-arbitrary forms of taxation, and the word literally means a ten percent cut. The incentive for the ruler is always to increase their personal profit by increasing the size of the pot he skims from, which means that as Machiavelli astutely pointed out a benevolent ruler and an amoral one will be indistinguishable.
The reason the modern situation is so bad is that the conditions where the Cathedral profits have nothing to do with how well it governs, and are in fact typically opposed. If Somalia stays a war zone for the next ten thousand years, that's quadrillions of aid dollars which otherwise wouldn't be spent.
Joseph Stieglitz, one of Bill Clinton's top economic advisers,made a similar point about modern corporate mismanagement. When the shares are controlled by an individual or a small number of individuals everyone has an interest in making sure that the company is running efficiently; when the shares are too widely distributed speculation rules and the Board of Directors ends up calling the shots in their own interests. The result is bad service, poor profits and a bunch of wealthy Board members.
Okay, so I came into this considering the notion that attempts at reform frequently fail plausible. 2) I also came into this believing that there isn't any good feedback mechanism to kill counterproductive charity, so it's not a stretch to apply that to reform. 3) Also, perverse incentives can sometimes perpetuate dysfunctional things.
You've helped me to connect these dots and I am considering the notion that a system of perverse incentives is fueling a large amount of counterproductive reform, at least insofar as it comes to foreign policy. I don't have the evidence to believe this is true yet, but it is a coherent notion that could well be true.
With regards to domestic policy (an area where I've got at least some evidence) I'm more skeptical. But then again, I take it the Cathedral does skim off the domestic pot, so maybe the effects cannot be observed domestically. I'm also not sure I understand the whole "the past was in many ways better" notion - I can't think of many metrics by which this is true.
So...
1) Is this different from other forms of corrupt or inefficient charity? What is specific to the Left? Could this not apply to any group who were after a cause which was not related to their own direct profit?
2) Can it be fixed by requiring more transparency and data collection to ensure that interventions are, in fact, effective? (To force the benefit to the Cathedral to be tied to how well its actions produce the results it claims to produce)...basically, can we try to hold Cthulhu accountable?
After all, revolting against Cthulhu altogether will increase entropy, and for reasons obvious to both leftists and reactionaries that is undesirable. Transparency inducing reform seems to be something that everyone generally gets behind. If it is true that the tool of the Cathedral's violence is reform, then reform seems to be the appropriate channel by which to modify it.
That's actually something I hadn't thought of. I guess my semi-conscious explanation for that was American "rugged individualism" but in retrospect that doesn't make half as much sense.
There are obvious areas of improvement, but I'm hard pressed to think of one which the Nazis or the Hapsburgs wouldn't have provided if they had modern technology. It's also not easy for me to speculate on the course of technological innovation in a monarchist or fascist world; that's more of a job for authors like Harry Turtledove. So in most of the obvious cases like life expectancy I think we can call it a wash.
In other places, we can see problems which only exist as a result of progressive ideology. The state of Africa, South America and much of Asia can be laid entirely at the feet of naive decolonization and parasitic clientism; even accounting for technology, much of the world's peoples likely led better lives as subjects of a foreign crown than they do under their "independent" nations. The mess we've made of the domestic economy, not to mention the world one, shouldn't be too much of a leap to ascribe to mismanagement. And even domestically, "liberated" women and "tolerated" minorities are consistently polled as being decreasingly happy over time, almost as if our progressive policies of equality were thrusting them into arenas they were fundamentally not fit to compete in.
The current dysgenic population shift is more ambiguous; I'd like to think that a Reactionary government could preserve or increase the value of our national stock, but there are also purely technological factors like the ease of birth control which are less amenable to regulation. Also ambiguous is Moldbug's democratic crime wave theory; his numbers show an order-of-magnitude increase in the murder rate over the last few hundred years, but the 18th century wasn't known for meticulous record keeping so that might be illusory. Yvain has some interesting posts calling the whole "Victorians were healthier!" meme into question at SlateStarCodex, so that theory has some holes also.
But to be honest I'm not that attached to the idea; it's interesting and more plausible than not, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was wrong either.
Freezing a liquid (or, God forbid, depositing a gas) is hard work, and the entropy does end up increasing globally, but you can do it. I think our present situation is the result of a reversible reaction, and if it is we just need the right catalysts or raw power to push it back to completion in the other direction. At least that's my hope anyway.
Edit: Wow, I really just mixed up sublimation and deposition... must be bedtime.
I actually have seen that. Check out those graphs - there's a difference between statistical significance and differences of magnitudes that actually matter. But lets suppose for a moment that the differences were of a magnitude large enough to influence policy:.
..."this makes me happier" and "I prefer this" are not the same thing. Feminist action might well have shifted happiness from women to men as a result of shifting work load from men to women, but I'm not sure why a more equitable labor and happiness distribution is a bad thing? Unless you're suggesting that it was a net loss.
I haven't seen the former...could it be attributable to the recession and wealth inequality? The latter is too large of a discussion to have.
I suppose arguing over the facts of these matters will derail somewhat. Back to the theoretical stuff...
So if I understand, this can be paraphrased as, "a government that is designed for the purpose of benefiting its people is likely to be worse than a government designed to exploit its people because the former has no concrete incentive".
If so, I still don't see why the solution isn't transparency and data collection, to give the government an incentive to make reality come out the way that the government claims it should. If the numbers come out wrong, the ruler loses power.
wait, not so fast
1) Doesn't that constitute a revolution and destruction of all existing power structures? Seems rather un-reactionary. My "transparency" solution was an attempt to work within the system, not to topple it.
2) You convinced me that it is possible that power structures designed to be non-exploitative tend to end up falling prey to perverse incentives that fuel a large amount of counterproductive action which benefits no one.
a) That's not the same as making a convincing case for the "order-chaos" thesis, where centralized power is superior to complex systems of distributed power. Thus far, I'd rather live in a random liberal democracy than a random totalitarian state, Why do you believe that a self interested and exploitative centralized power is superior to a self-interested and exploitative network made up of multiple distributed systems of power?
b) Your solution didn't even stipulate that our rulers must act in self interest. They'd still have to appease the populace. It didn't hand them any real power. Wouldn't a better solution (what I think maximizes Order and Self Interested Rulers, not what I think best maximizes utility) be to hand over all our weapons and military power to China and tell them to rule us as they see fit? Or, if we really had faith in this concept that even Fnargl would be superior, wouldn't North Korea suffice?
If me and the eminent Professor Hawking found ourselves sharing an apartment, it would be insane to distribute the labor equally between us. Comparative advantage tells us that he should use his enormously powerful mind and reputation pay a much higher share of the rent while I can use my young and increasingly muscular body to do any household chores which need doing. This turned into a slash-fic way too fast, but you get my drift here; men and women need to pursue tasks which complement their natural advantages.
This doesn't mean women should be barefoot and pregnant, there is plenty of room in the world for exceptional women and men to take each other's roles, but it does mean that in general the distribution will more closely resemble traditional societies.
I understand why avoiding it is wise, but it's not a particularly large discussion. The facts are pretty damning; the least capable elements of society are fast outbreeding the most capable, and immigration is not helping matters. The only solutions which come to mind are either very ugly or rely on the rapid maturation and implementation of technology which the Left strongly opposes.
Yup. If you want a game theoretic argument look at Stiglitz's work on the theory of information asymmetry in firms. [Edit: initial link was to overly-technical and not particularly demonstrative article; I'll look for a better one but his books might have to be sufficient]. He doesn't make the political connection, but it's a trivial one.
Hopefully this will also make the "widely distributed voting shares = bad management" point clearer as well.
(Note: I've read his conclusions in his book 'Whither Socialism?' but not the research behind them. In either case I'm not an economist or a game theory expert.)
I gave Dean Minow total control of the executive branch (a power Presidents have lacked for the better part of the century) and the ability to arbitrarily re-interpret the Constitution currently reserved for the Supreme Court. Considering we're taking about the mammoth USG here, that's more power in her hands than I can easily imagine. But of course she'd be far from my first pick for the job, just better than the current state of affairs.
China is a half-way decent choice, definitely better than the Harvard Dynasty, but still not really ideal. The Communist Party rules as a sort of semi-meritocratic natural aristocracy, very much like the old Eunuchs did really, but there is no dynastic Emperor to balance the equation. Each individual Party member is both a state employee and a shareholder in the People's Republic of China; while mild compared to the Western welfare state, graft and patronage within the Party is severe. Furthermore, any ambitious young Commie could eventually climb their way up and replace the Premier himself, which means the leadership will always be insecure and tempted towards purges as a means of stabilizing their positions.
North Korea on the other hand is a communist dictatorship out of time; even in it's relationship to the US it mirrors the USSR. We prop them up with food aid and timely blackmail payments while sympathetic liberal elements in the US systematically oppose both a definitive conclusion to the (ongoing) Korean War and any attempt to sever our economic umbilical cord with them. Even their legitimacy depends on our support; without the constant threat of an American invasion which will never come the Kims couldn't possibly hope to keep their sustaining isolationism alive. They are an obsolete form of Leftist government but leftist nonetheless.
Ideally we'd want someone more like the Saudi Royals or any of the UAE's Emirs; capable established dynasties with existing ties into the US political structure and a traditionalist-yet-irreligious worldview. They wouldn't be able to rule directly, they're too foreign for one thing, but if the House of Windsor could rule India for three centuries the House of Saud could probably manage the continental US as a suzerainty for a while.
By “equitable” I'd mean that we each start out with half of the pie; it doesn't stop being equitable if I like crust and dislike filling and you like filling and dislike crust so we mutually agree to trade my share of filling for your share of crust (i.e. this or a quick-and-dirty informal approximation thereof).
What do you mean by “exceptional”, 20% or 0.1%?
Note also that, given larger IQ variance among men than among women, the Flynn effect means that the fraction of people above a given IQ threshold who are male has decreased with time; technological advances mean that low-IQ labour has become less useful; and anyway IQ overweighs visuospatial intelligence compared to its importance today inflating male scores (and deflating Jewish scores). Fun fact: 59.4% of the people who graduated at my university in 2012 were female.
I suppose there are differences among different parts of the present-day western world with respect to that: if I understand correctly what kind of technology you're talking about, where I come from it's the Catholic right that's opposing it.
Oh, hahahahahaha, if that ever happened in some wacky weird moldbuggy universe... that'd be like Vatican trying to grab supreme jurisdiction over all Christian denominations by proclaiming the Pope to be the spiritual heir of Martin Luther and "interpreting" Luther's theses to show how all modern-day Protestants need to forget about their minor disagreements and follow the RCC.
Which is to say... you do realize that the vast majority of serious leftists - including American leftists, and I mean people who self-identify as socialists, left-libertarians, anarchists, etc - have nothing but scorn and contempt towards the NYT? In the left-wing interpretation of the "Cathederal", the NYT is not an active weapon of the Big Bad System like in yours, but it is nonetheless viewed as a symbol of moral bankrupcy, insidious propaganda and serving as the mouthpiece of the neoliberal elite. In short, it is not a case of the NYT being not progressive enough for a few of the most zealous commies; in their (our) interpretation, it is unambiguiously an anti-Left force.