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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.
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.
No, see, out of the set of all societies only a very small fraction is "not oppressive" by a reasonable definition. So unless you are really aiming for that small subset, you are all but guaranteed not to get there. The question should be "is there a particular reason why X would not be oppressive?"
We have more tools to oppress now, as well. In some sense feudalism was only a thing because you couldn't send messages faster than a horse/boat.
The "reasonable definition" is tricky to agree on - many would say that aspects of modern democracies are oppressive in some respects. I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that in historical feudal societies the aristocracy generally gained power through military force, rather than economic or intellectual routes. This is going to select for people who are naturally inclined towards oppression.
Such as? I know there is increased surveillance, but given events such as the arab spring, it seems like modern communications are far more a tool for expressing and organising dissent.
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.