dark enlightenment

[Clay S]

this guy is terrible but he's basically looking for an oligarchy of experts, which is similar to the "ideal" goal of EBJ, except that EBJ understands we have to do this democratically since there's no way to pick aligned angels.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=NcSil8NeQq8&si=AHCP7PwchWKpN_2K&t=428

[Rajiv Prabhakar]

I read the interview this guy did with nytimes. Apparently he thinks that Nelson Mandela and the Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik, are both comparably bad. 

I think most people would agree that they ideally want the nation to be led, either directly or indirectly, by extremely smart and capable people. The hard part is: 

- figuring out an unbiased way to pick experts

- ensuring that the experts don't just pursue policies that benefit themselves at the expense of society

Does this guy have a proposed solution for the above 2 problems? Without that, his ideas are pretty much worthless. If his solution is "democracy bad, billionaires good, dictators good", that's even worse. 

Regards,
Rajiv

On Thu, Jan 30, 2025, 7:39 PM Clay S <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:

this guy is terrible but he's basically looking for an oligarchy of experts, which is similar to the "ideal" goal of EBJ, except that EBJ understands we have to do this democratically since there's no way to pick aligned angels.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=NcSil8NeQq8&si=AHCP7PwchWKpN_2K&t=428

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[Paul Melman]

I wrote the first draft of this essay back in December and recently updated it after Yarvin's NYT interview. I'm submitting it to Palladium Magazine soon. It's a critique of the lack of real solutions put forth by DE thinkers and a sortition-based proposal that is meant to feel in line with their ethos.  https://leaflet.pub/08323ab4-05be-4b03-b1a6-81d0d8fdc502

[Clay S]

wow, you guys are both on the case. yeah rajiv, this is the video of the interview you read the transcription of, it appears. and i had the exact same thought! it's like, i'm actually kinda sympathetic with his underlying assessment of the problem! but his "solution" isn't one.

- figuring out an unbiased way to pick experts
- ensuring that the experts don't just pursue policies that benefit themselves at the expense of society

yeah, this is the "alignment and capability" issue i mentioned here:

https://medium.com/@clayshentrup/voters-are-the-problem-why-juries-should-decide-elections-e647b5442637

which i had previously called "aim vs alignment" in my original "ultrademocracy" treatise that led me down the logical rabbit hole to EBJ.

https://medium.com/@clayshentrup/ultrademocracy-1777ede9fd7e

when people independently discover/invent the same thing, that's usually a sign there's something there. my thinking was, there's just absolutely no way to create evaluation criteria that isn't biased...except if the criterion is just "randomness". and the only non-biased way to get capability is to have people study/deliberate with each candidate being biased in their own favor. i've thought and thought about this and i don't see anything more optimal.

that said, i have recently come around to one other tangential model, which is more like a marketplace. in the free market, an entrepreneur can basically go create whatever they want, and the way you ensure alignment is that consumers have the choice to purchase it or not. like, i worry that even in an EBJ world, you're not going to get hyper-rationalist economic policy like pigovian plus land value taxes (no in-kind excludable benefits allowed) plus UBI. so this is a situation where i think you'd just need to go found your own community. but what may happen is that new residents come for the job opportunities and ostensible prosperity, but then they start tearing down these rules because they aren't one of the elite experts who put them into place, and their mental model doesn't allow them to see how all that prosperity was a direct result of those policies. this is the "chesterton's fence" allegory (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/chestertons-fence). so the way you deal with this is that you encode the enlightened ideals into a constitution, where it's extremely hard to change it, e.g. it takes a 2/3 majority vote or higher.

but this model can be problematic when it's applied over too large an expanse. e.g. i have a lot of problems with the 2nd amendment (to just use that as an example), but it's almost impossible to change it...and i think it's actually bad. sure i can vote with my feet, but it feels like this would have been better left to states, so that surely at least a few states would have adopted such a rule in their constitution. i'm a big fan of a model where the federal government does almost nothing but guarantee some basic liberal rights (e.g. equality, no slavery), and states are like nations but with a strong protection for free trade and movement, so that people can vote with their feet and experiment a lot.

it's also just hard (nearly impossible) to do this because there's not unclaimed territory to move to and create your own society, exempt from federal law. so EBJ is the best we can generally do, i think.

[Clay S]

On Friday, January 31, 2025 at 12:45:37 PM UTC-8 pmel...@gmail.com wrote:

I wrote the first draft of this essay back in December and recently updated it after Yarvin's NYT interview. I'm submitting it to Palladium Magazine soon. It's a critique of the lack of real solutions put forth by DE thinkers and a sortition-based proposal that is meant to feel in line with their ethos.  https://leaflet.pub/08323ab4-05be-4b03-b1a6-81d0d8fdc502

this is great writing.

[Rajiv Prabhakar]

Fascinating stuff. I like the concept of a free-market solution to effective governance. Something like:

1. "Founder" starts his own micro-state, and is a benevolent dictator for life
2. Founder does a great job of governing his state, and implementing good public policies
3. People start moving to the state, and doing business with it, because it is run well
4. Some of these people have horrible ideas and intuitions around public policy. But it doesn't matter, since the founder is a dictator
5. As the state becomes wealthier, it starts buying up more and more of its surrounding land from neighboring states that are less effective
6. Over time, less effective states go extinct, and almost everyone gets to live in the more well-run states

Some problems with the above model:

1. Without any other safeguards, we just reinvented all of human history prior to democracy. Instead of abiding by free-market norms, dictators will start invading/colonizing/enslaving others
2. To prevent this, you'll still need something like the "federal government" to ensure that all its microstates are following the rules. And you'll need some way of electing representatives, or voting on policies, for the federal government
3. Successful states can eventually turn dysfunctional, especially if the benevolent dictator gets dementia or appoints his idiot son to replace him. When this happens, if the state refuses to sell any of its land, it can effectively lock it up forever. You'll need something like a federal tax system, where states that aren't able to pay their taxes are forced to sell their land. The tax will need to be high enough to phase out the less successful states
4. Can a social safety net survive the above system? Dictators will be about as altruistic as your average CEO - most will provide just enough social services needed for good PR, and to attract/retain desirable workers. States that are too altruistic will find themselves outcompeted in the long run. If we want anything like Medicare, UBI, or ADA protections, I suspect it will only be possible via a democratic federal government

Of course, there's also a huge public opposition to market-driven states. See what happened with Prospera.

> I wrote the first draft of this essay back in December and recently updated it after Yarvin's NYT interview. I'm submitting it to Palladium Magazine soon

Paul and I had a great chat about this last weekend. The most controversial proposal from his writeup would be that only Fortune-500 VPs and above will have any political voice and representation. Some time ago, I had written about an alternative way to "pick experts" without relying on any centralized institution to pick and choose experts. It is based on Google's PageRank algorithm (many other similar algorithms exist as well), which analyzes social graphs from a purely egalitarian starting point, in order to eventually derive the most authoritative experts: https://outlookzen.com/2014/06/29/reinventing-democracy-the-google-way/

Regards,
Rajiv

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