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This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.

martin-t 1y ago
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.
- roenxi 1y ago
  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.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    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.
    - pqtyw 1y ago
      Or complete stagnation and entrenchment of current political class and their networks. Not that its necessarily not the case anyway but it would be very heard for anyone outside the system to break in.
      - martin-t 1y ago
        That's why term limits exist. Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions. IMO: 1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals. 2) Term limits should apply to many more positions. 3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.
        pqtyw 1y ago
        Its tricky, though. There might be people who are doing a perfectly good job and kicking them arbitrarily might be suboptimal. Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing. But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well.. > The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.
    - roenxi 1y ago
      > Banning campaigning would go a long way. With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
      - kjkjadksj 1y ago
        And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?
        roenxi 1y ago
        If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.
        close04 1y ago
        Routine governance in Stalin’s time is what we now call Stalinism. “Just the way we do things” doesn’t tell you much about the quality. Unlimited campaign spending has a huge potential to consolidate power and allow more spe ding in a positive feedback loop.
    - SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
      Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
      - kjkjadksj 1y ago
        That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.
        SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
        I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.
        kjkjadksj 1y ago
        I mean, that is exactly why people even know their names. You think people actually read schumers policy positions on his website? Maybe a single digit percentage do. Most everyone just blindly picks the party line option even on primaries usually the party endorsed candidate wins.
    - jahewson 1y ago
      Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.
      - kjkjadksj 1y ago
        Initial debates usually feature all serious candidates anyhow. Advertisement aka propaganda draws a line for me.
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        I used to think that, before 2016. Apparently, incoherent rambling is also a successful strategy.
        esafak 1y ago
        Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist (2004) https://vimeo.com/90583017 https://vimeo.com/90583017
      - yepitwas 1y ago
        Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.
    - ch4s3 1y ago
      File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
      - kjkjadksj 1y ago
        If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
        sokoloff 1y ago
        Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else. What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote? Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
        kjkjadksj 1y ago
        Well that doesn’t happen currently so it probably won’t happen in this scenario. Nor does it really happen in countries that have implemented bans on private campaign financing.
        ch4s3 1y ago
        Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.
      - mantas 1y ago
        Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
    - TFYS 1y ago
      I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials. But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected. What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it… I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
  - argo_navis 1y ago
    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
  - Buttons840 1y ago
    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.
    - Yoric 1y ago
      > 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. I'm not certain. Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one. I'm less familiar with other examples.
    - M95D 1y ago
      > Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. Link? > We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book. Open up a git for the book and let the people do PRs and bug reports. One file per article.
  - martin-t 1y ago
    And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone. Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences. The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs. Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries. I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess. And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.
    - cindyllm 1y ago
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- Terr_ 1y ago
  > 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    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".
    - idle_zealot 1y ago
      No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.
      - 1y ago
- alexashka 1y ago
  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? :)
  - xyzzy_plugh 1y ago
    > 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?
    - alexashka 1y ago
      The kinds of jobs I imagine would leave people with far more energy and time to do whatever they want - including learning, or not learning :)
- verisimi 1y ago
  I don't think those at the top of the social hierarchy would condone the 'better system'.
- DeathArrow 1y ago
  >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.
- k__ 1y ago
  Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right. No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in. Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
  - corimaith 1y ago
    Japan has relatively cheaper real estate because of their lax zoning laws and frequent earthquakes drive the long term value of construction down. Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate. It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      >Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate. Isn't this because most of Asia has just copied the western capitalist housing asset monetisation scheme with Japan being the only exception?
      - kiba 1y ago
        What do you mean by monenization scheme? Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land. The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements. So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.
    - k__ 1y ago
      Better laws/incentives could still pull people out of the housing market.
- c22 1y ago
  I think if freedom is a desired trait then your system cannot (will not) be entirely dictated by any design.
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    If the pre-freedom systems are so locked in that post-freedom systems can't emerge, are you free?
- chewz 1y ago
  > optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity. You are confusing narrative, a positive spin with actual rules of the system. In political system they are never the same. Freedom, equal opportunity etc are not objectives of our political system, they are just the narrative.
- Aerroon 1y ago
  I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.
- leobg 1y ago
  BF Skinner had the same idea. You can read it in his book, Walden Two.
eleveriven 1y ago
You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
- bestouff 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - cantor_S_drug 1y ago
    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.
    - crossroadsguy 1y ago
      The power (access to tools, system, and opportunity) to sacrifice an individual by another individual has become immensely disproportionate of late among individuals of different social and economic strata.
    - bell-cot 1y ago
      If you look at history, that's really not how elites react to violence (or its threat) from the 99%. Regicide is a Crime against God - meaning the social order which puts the elites on top. Vs. peasants are expendable at scale if the elites feel that they need to violently defend their elite status. And this ain't chess, where Pawn x King is just another move. Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository. If an assassin manages to kill a king, then 100:1 that it's an inside job - the perp is either another one of the elite, or acting his behalf.
      - BoxFour 1y ago
        This is an odd thing to say given the events of the past few days and even last couple years: “Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository” Your broader argument still holds that those in power often don’t tend to view isolated threats from the public as truly existential threats (until they do, like we just saw in Nepal). But it’s a bit hard to agree that even in America things are truly that much different.
IAmGraydon 1y ago
Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.
- watwut 1y ago
  > rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down I mean, project 2025, heritage foundation, Thiel, Trump ... like in fact they are exactly on it.
- martin-t 1y ago
  Nobody said it's a conspiracy. It's simple specialization. Some people are good at productive positive-sum work, others are good at office politics, manipulation and scams. The latter are good at accumulating power to extract value from the former. Imagine a world where workers decided how much to pay their assistant ("manager") according to how much tangential effort and overhead he saves them so they can focus on their core competency.

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.

roenxi 1y ago
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.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  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.
  - pqtyw 1y ago
    Or complete stagnation and entrenchment of current political class and their networks. Not that its necessarily not the case anyway but it would be very heard for anyone outside the system to break in.
    - martin-t 1y ago
      That's why term limits exist. Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions. IMO: 1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals. 2) Term limits should apply to many more positions. 3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.
      - pqtyw 1y ago
        Its tricky, though. There might be people who are doing a perfectly good job and kicking them arbitrarily might be suboptimal. Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing. But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well.. > The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    > Banning campaigning would go a long way. With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?
      - roenxi 1y ago
        If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.
        close04 1y ago
        Routine governance in Stalin’s time is what we now call Stalinism. “Just the way we do things” doesn’t tell you much about the quality. Unlimited campaign spending has a huge potential to consolidate power and allow more spe ding in a positive feedback loop.
  - SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
    Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.
      - SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
        I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.
        kjkjadksj 1y ago
        I mean, that is exactly why people even know their names. You think people actually read schumers policy positions on his website? Maybe a single digit percentage do. Most everyone just blindly picks the party line option even on primaries usually the party endorsed candidate wins.
  - jahewson 1y ago
    Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      Initial debates usually feature all serious candidates anyhow. Advertisement aka propaganda draws a line for me.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      I used to think that, before 2016. Apparently, incoherent rambling is also a successful strategy.
      - esafak 1y ago
        Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist (2004) https://vimeo.com/90583017 https://vimeo.com/90583017
    - yepitwas 1y ago
      Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.
  - ch4s3 1y ago
    File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
      - sokoloff 1y ago
        Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else. What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote? Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
        kjkjadksj 1y ago
        Well that doesn’t happen currently so it probably won’t happen in this scenario. Nor does it really happen in countries that have implemented bans on private campaign financing.
      - ch4s3 1y ago
        Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.
    - mantas 1y ago
      Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
  - TFYS 1y ago
    I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials. But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected. What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it… I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
- argo_navis 1y ago
  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
- Buttons840 1y ago
  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.
  - Yoric 1y ago
    > 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. I'm not certain. Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one. I'm less familiar with other examples.
  - M95D 1y ago
    > Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. Link? > We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book. Open up a git for the book and let the people do PRs and bug reports. One file per article.
- martin-t 1y ago
  And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone. Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences. The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs. Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries. I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess. And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.
  - cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
Terr_ 1y ago
> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  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".
  - idle_zealot 1y ago
    No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.
    - 1y ago
alexashka 1y ago
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? :)
- xyzzy_plugh 1y ago
  > 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?
  - alexashka 1y ago
    The kinds of jobs I imagine would leave people with far more energy and time to do whatever they want - including learning, or not learning :)
verisimi 1y ago
I don't think those at the top of the social hierarchy would condone the 'better system'.
DeathArrow 1y ago
>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.
k__ 1y ago
Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right. No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in. Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
- corimaith 1y ago
  Japan has relatively cheaper real estate because of their lax zoning laws and frequent earthquakes drive the long term value of construction down. Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate. It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate. Isn't this because most of Asia has just copied the western capitalist housing asset monetisation scheme with Japan being the only exception?
    - kiba 1y ago
      What do you mean by monenization scheme? Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land. The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements. So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.
  - k__ 1y ago
    Better laws/incentives could still pull people out of the housing market.
c22 1y ago
I think if freedom is a desired trait then your system cannot (will not) be entirely dictated by any design.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  If the pre-freedom systems are so locked in that post-freedom systems can't emerge, are you free?
chewz 1y ago
> optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity. You are confusing narrative, a positive spin with actual rules of the system. In political system they are never the same. Freedom, equal opportunity etc are not objectives of our political system, they are just the narrative.
Aerroon 1y ago
I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.
leobg 1y ago
BF Skinner had the same idea. You can read it in his book, Walden Two.

eleveriven 1y ago

You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent

bestouff 1y ago
[flagged]
- cantor_S_drug 1y ago
  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.
  - crossroadsguy 1y ago
    The power (access to tools, system, and opportunity) to sacrifice an individual by another individual has become immensely disproportionate of late among individuals of different social and economic strata.
  - bell-cot 1y ago
    If you look at history, that's really not how elites react to violence (or its threat) from the 99%. Regicide is a Crime against God - meaning the social order which puts the elites on top. Vs. peasants are expendable at scale if the elites feel that they need to violently defend their elite status. And this ain't chess, where Pawn x King is just another move. Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository. If an assassin manages to kill a king, then 100:1 that it's an inside job - the perp is either another one of the elite, or acting his behalf.
    - BoxFour 1y ago
      This is an odd thing to say given the events of the past few days and even last couple years: “Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository” Your broader argument still holds that those in power often don’t tend to view isolated threats from the public as truly existential threats (until they do, like we just saw in Nepal). But it’s a bit hard to agree that even in America things are truly that much different.

IAmGraydon 1y ago

Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.

watwut 1y ago
> rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down I mean, project 2025, heritage foundation, Thiel, Trump ... like in fact they are exactly on it.
martin-t 1y ago
Nobody said it's a conspiracy. It's simple specialization. Some people are good at productive positive-sum work, others are good at office politics, manipulation and scams. The latter are good at accumulating power to extract value from the former. Imagine a world where workers decided how much to pay their assistant ("manager") according to how much tangential effort and overhead he saves them so they can focus on their core competency.