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Nornagest comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong
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Comments (231)
Sounds like Imperial China's civil service exams, with emphasis on different skills. (The civil service exams focused on Chinese classics, which is probably a decent proxy for conscientiousness and intelligence but not so good at measuring social skills.)
There's obviously something to be said for the system, since it lasted for better than a thousand years and weathered several dynastic changes. But plenty has also been written about its drawbacks, and the main ones seem to revolve around regulatory capture: empowering experts to rule also empowers them to decide the meaning of "expert", which we might expect to incrementally make a system less meritocratic and more aristocratic. Goodhart's law is also worth thinking about.
From what little I know, Imperial China was a highly functional civilisation, and as you say, any system that can last a thousand years is impressive.
Of course, far more thought would be needed to set the system up. Perhaps the examination-writing body should be separate from the rest of government? Perhaps it alone should have some form of democratic oversight? Would there be a constitution as well? Overall, I think the best thing is to have fluid intelligence as an essential component of the tests - if the tests focus on Shakespeare and medieval Europe then they can be accused of cultural bias, or if they mainly recruit experts from elite universities then the administration process there wields tremendous political power. But Raven's progressive matrices for instance is completely objective.
Anyway, isn't democracy somewhat aristocratic? The current UK prime minister is the 5th cousin twice removed of the Queen, and politicians tend to come from very posh public schools (one school in particular produced 19 PMs). In the US, the Bush line has been described as aristocratic, and it takes a lot of money to run a presidential campaign.
Um, "cultural bias", i.e., limiting important posts to people who've assimilated into and agree with the culture, was a large part of the point of the Chinese Examination System and a big part of the reason why the system remained so stable.
You sound very confident of that. Is there positive evidence for it, or is it just that it seems plausible?
Nornagest seems to be worried about the system becoming aristocratic, so I somehow doubt that he'd be interested in a more NRx flavoured technocracy. While technocracy could come in many forms, I personally would advocate for a less culture-neutral system - at a bare minimum the test should require fluency in the native language and knowledge of the countries' history.
But I also wouldn't advocate too much cultural bias - after all, we are discussing China in a positive light!
The most important aspect (from the point of view of stability) is making sure people agree with the concept of a test-based meritocratic society and with parts of the culture that support it.
It's equally important that the officials who are chosen that way aren't too awful at their jobs.
I would agree that this is important, with the caveat that a system should be able to evolve to changing circumstances, so there ought to be room for a dissenting voice within the part of the system that controls the systems evolution.
Well, the historical Chinese system wasn't very good at dealing with changing circumstances and dealt with it by discouraging technological innovation.
If you let the system change freely it'll change to a form that causes the meritocratic parts (and even the openness to dissenting voices part) to collapse.
I don't know whether it's possible to combine stability and adaptability. My attempt would be to include an "unquestionable core" to protect meritocracy and the ability to question everything else. But as St. Thomas Aquinas's successors discovered, even that may not work.
What exactly do you think it will change into?
A plausible idea. Essentially the government would have a constitution. Another idea would be that the constitution can be changed, but with differing levels of unanimity needed (so the "unquestionable core" would need a 90% vote to change for example - I'm worried about making anything entirely irrevocable.)
Well to common failure modes are collapse to hereditary aristocracy and "pod people" takeover by fanatical ideologues. The way the later works is that since not "pod people" are willing to hire competent "pod people" but the fanatics will base hiring on ideological fanaticism rather than competence, an ideological faction will gradual take over unless stopped by other forces. For example, look at the current state of academia outside hard STEM fields.
This is exactly why I have not mentioned interviews anywhere in the exam process, otherwise yes the pod people would take over. I suppose it might be possible to have interviews for parts of government except the bit which oversees the examination process. Aristocracy seems a lot less likely, unless generations of associative breeding lead to a multimodal distibution of IQ. This might have been the case in the indian caste system, a quick search finding this HBD guy who says that subgroup means vary from 80ish to 112 and this "progressive".
Who says:
Errrm... ok. That doesn't sound very progressive.
Anyway, it is also possible that any sort of transhumanism capable of significantly raising IQ would also turn a meritocracy into a aristocracy, where the wealthy elites can afford BCIs or embryo selection or whatever and thus also form a cognitive elite which dominates government, and passes laws that benefit this elite. This is one of the more reasonable objections to transhumanism, but there is no particular reason why this aristocracy would be oppressive, and certainly not compared to old feudal aristocracies, because in the modern world exit is an option. Finally, this situation would probably not persist long without a singularity, and for that reason in general I do not think that stability of the meritocracy in the long run is of particularly high importance compared to good governance in the short to medium term.
Why exactly history and what do you consider history to be in this case? Dates?
Are you familiar with the adage "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it"? I am talking about the standard history exams that one might take in school or at university, and when I studied history at school there was a greater emphasis on 'why' rather than 'when'. Its important to know roughly when stuff happened, but only insofar as it helps a general understanding.
And world history in general is important, but your own countries history is especially relevant, so more weight should be attached to it, although certainly not to the exclusion of all else.
You misspelled "Kennedy".
I never said that the same thing didn't apply to Kennedy.
You can easily tune your fluid intelligence test in a way that gives woman an advantage or in a way that gives men an advantage.
No, performance on that test is trainable.
If typically male forms of fluid intelligence are more important for government, then all other things being equal there should be more men in government.
If typically female forms of fluid intelligence are more important for government, then all other things being equal there should be more women in government.
Perhaps you would want a female foreign minister and a male minister of defence?
I was also thinking that most people take the IQ test at 16 or 18, in the same way you have the SATs in the US. In fact, in the US you could just use SAT scores instead. This way, everyone would train for the test.
Who's the "you" you are talking about?
I probably should have written 'one'.
That doesn't solve the issue. Who get's to make that decision?
A lot of mental tests benefit some heuristics over other heuristics. Maybe you find a heuristic that correlates with openness to experience. If your test favors people with high openness to experience you get less conservative people in your government.
Test design is highly political if the results of the test matter.
I guess using the classics is also good for preventing standard drift, since they are set in stone.
But reading the Wikipedia page, the exams seem a lot more subjective than I had imagined, basically entirely based on free-form essays on political problems? It seems this would lead to a ruling class of The Economist columnists, which is a pretty terrifying prospect. :)