Jayson_Virissimo comments on Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: passive_fist 23 November 2013 06:04AM

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Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 November 2013 07:12:23PM *  9 points [-]

If you accept the criticism it makes of democracy you are already basically Neoreactionary

And if we accept the Reactionary criticisms of democracy and the Progressive criticisms of aristocracy and monarchy? What then?

Comment author: drethelin 26 November 2013 07:46:51PM 14 points [-]

Then you get to happily look down on everyone's naive worldviews until you realize that world is fucked and go cry in a corner.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 November 2013 10:29:39PM 5 points [-]

Been there, done that, realized that crying won't make the world any less fucked, come back from the corner.

Comment author: hyporational 28 November 2013 10:43:07PM 2 points [-]

Psychosocial development of puberty in a nutshell?

Comment author: [deleted] 27 November 2013 06:50:04AM 4 points [-]

Doesn't reactionary or progressive criticism in itself if taken seriously already do this?

Comment author: [deleted] 27 November 2013 12:09:51AM 5 points [-]

Then you either throw up your hands and go meta with secession/seasteading/etc. or try to find existing systems that neither of those systems would apply to... how about Switzerland?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 27 November 2013 01:35:35PM 9 points [-]

I am curious why Switzerland isn't more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...

The cynical explanation is that promoting a system someone else invented and tested is not so good for signalling.

Comment author: Lumifer 27 November 2013 04:00:41PM 9 points [-]

I am curious why Switzerland isn't more popular among people who want to change the political system. It has direct democracy, decades of success, few problems...

The correct question is whether Switzerland's success is caused by its political system. If not, emulating it won't help.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 27 November 2013 04:14:26PM 10 points [-]

We can at least be sure that Switzerland's success hasn't been prevented by its political system. This isn't a proof that the system should be copied, but it's at least a hint that it should be studied.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 November 2013 11:20:19AM 1 point [-]

Switzerland is pretty small, and it's not obvious to me that its political system would scale well to larger countries. But then again, it's not obvious to me that it wouldn't, either.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 28 November 2013 12:49:25PM *  4 points [-]

My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws. These differences allow people to do some lower-scale experiments, and probably allow an individual to feel like a more important part of the whole (one in a few thousands feels better than one in a few millions). I would guess this division to regions is very important.

So a question is, if we wanted to "Switzerland-ize" a larger country, should we aim for the same size (population) or the same number of regions? Greater region size may reduce the effect of an individual feeling important, but greater number of regions could make the interactions among them more complicated. Or maybe the solution would be to have regions and sub-regions, but then it is not obvious (i.e. cannot be copied straightforwardly) what should be the power relationship between the regions and their sub-regions.

It would be safer to try this experiment first in a country of a similar size. Just in case some Illuminati are reading this discussion, I volunteer Slovakia for this experiment, although my countrymen might disagree. Please feel free to ignore them. :D

Comment author: Lumifer 28 November 2013 11:42:22PM 3 points [-]

My very superficial knowledge says that Switzerland consists of relatively independent regions, which can have different tax rates, and maybe even different laws.

Reminds me of some large countries... in North America, I think? :-)

Comment author: Randy_M 07 January 2014 05:00:51PM 0 points [-]

For various levels of superficiality, yeah.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 July 2014 01:06:55PM 0 points [-]

Then again, population-wise it's bigger than reactionary poster children such as Singapore or Monaco and comparable to progressivist poster children such as Sweden or Denmark.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 November 2013 06:37:12AM *  4 points [-]

I want to emphasize again monarchy only recently gained popularity among neoreactionaries, its possible the majority of them still dream of Moldbug's SovCorps. Anarcho-Papist for example basically believes anarcho-capitalism is best but thinks the Neoreactionary analysis of why society is so leftist is correct.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 01 December 2013 02:50:42AM 0 points [-]

You make incremental patches and innovations in the existing setup, and keep a very close eye on the results.

Comment author: Lumifer 26 November 2013 07:37:22PM 0 points [-]

What then?

Somebody's mind explodes :-D