Comment by docsaintly
8 hours ago
This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.
8 hours ago
This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.
You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
Hierarchies and funnelling behavior seems to be emergent from people desiring more, and some securing it.
But but ... i thought it ought to "tricky down" ?
There is in one sense the king and the pawn are similar. Pawns are many, kings are few. If one pawn sacrifices itself to sacrifice the king, then kings ought to fear pawns and not take undue advantage.
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives.
I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.
Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?
Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
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Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
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The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s
> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs
> > that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them.
They're right... when the other is someone like them.
And they have a blind spot for an other who is not like them.
Meanwhile, what is the blind spot of the people who are not like that (i.e., who believe in equality)?
Is their blind spot that they can't imagine so many people who are trying to gain advantage, and being deceitful about it?
This analysis is highly muddled. "making things equal" != democracy. Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies. The concepts of democracy and capitalism have a far greater reach than the current US political climate where both are malfunctioning. The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country and corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
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>that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them
That's true even in the most leftist and forcefully egalitarian regimes like communism. There are a few taking the ultimate decisions and there are some that benefit.
Our current regime lies through their teeth daily. Like obvious, completely made up lies. Every. Day. It's not a misunderstanding. One side is pushing for authoritarianism, one is not. One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. I'm so fuckin tired of pretending there is just some kind of misunderstanding between both "sides".
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I don't think those at the top of the social hierarchy would condone the 'better system'.
We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
> We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job.
Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.
Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.
I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.
I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?
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>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.