Shareholder votes make far more sense to me -- proportionate with exposure. It is weird to have net transfer beneficiaries get to vote in the elections that decide how much more free stuff they get. Letting them vote on fiscal profligacy would be like allowing short sellers to vote in corporate elections. They're on the other side. It would be in inherent and obvious conflict of interest.
This was entertaining to read and certainly contains some truth, but nonetheless I think it is overly cynical about group behavior, and then simultaneously not cynical enough about your preferred systems/ideologies and "crowds".
In defense of group behavior, it provides the conditions under which the good kinds of "crowds" can emerge (or be regulated into existence). You gesture at this with the traffic light example, but I don't think fully examine its implications. We need rigid rules to coordinate around in order to have a predictable, orderly society where positive sum exchanges can routinely occur. A hypothetical pure crowd with no group-based order around it incentivizes violence, fraud, and abuse of unequal power dynamics.
Compare labor conditions in the early industrial revolution to the post-New Deal era. What broke those were group-based labor unions and political parties advocating for blunt policies like the 40-hour workweek, OSHA, bans on child labor, and the minimum wage. I don't see any other realistic way for the downsides of industrial capitalism to have been curbed. It wasn't going to organically emerge via some "crowd" deliberating on it, and the market itself did not deliver it.
You often need blunt instruments to shove a crowd out of an undesirable equilibrium. Sure, you can imagine a more efficient and intellectually satisfying system of Pigouvian Taxes, but those don't actually solve any of the political "group" problems you mention, because we'd still have to decide what harms count and how to measure them. It's very easy to imagine them not working in practice.
So I think you aren't cynical enough about crowds. Even setting aside coercion and fraud, crowds often converge on stupid policies and bad values. For example, you cite NIMBYism as "group" behavior, but actually it seems to me that a lot of NIMBYism emerges through crowd-like behavior. The more local you go, and the more voice individuals have, the more NIMBY the politics are. In fact, YIMBYs have been trying to make the issue of housing more group-oriented (and the YIMBY movement is a much more coherent "group" than NIMBYs, who seem more dispersed and localized). It turns out that blunt, group-oriented state politics are more conducive to good policy outcomes on housing. Why? Because focusing on the blunt goal of "affordable housing and economic growth good" is better than some nuanced deliberative process of local residents who, usually, converge on the idea that they don't want change and like their city the way it is thank you very much. Most people are NIMBYs when the develop is literally in their backyard.
"a group just is a collection of individuals with a shared identity, agenda, narrative, and strategy. What else would a group be?"
yes, so everyone is in several groups, since no one is a singular individual with a separately bootstrapped identity, agenda, narrative and strategy. crowds *just* are groups of different sizes, since humans are hypersocially interdependent by coercive default, courtesy of earth biochemistry/physics.
*constitutively interdependent, and not just with other humans, but with several other species and non-living phenomena. the unphysical, idealized fiction of 'the rational individual' is a bizarre non-explanation.
I personally like a constitutional republic with a constitution that upholds individual rights such as life, liberty and property. The leaders are democratically elected, but their powers are limited by the constitution.
Nice work, this guy gets it. Democracy is the ultimate form of moral outsourcing and the ultimate scapegoat for everything that is wrong in our lives. What's it going to look like in 10 years when a strong plurality of folks have cognitively offloaded and atrophied themselves into effectively a mental disorder while continuing to be encouraged to try to force their preferences onto their neighbors? It's gonna get real weird.
If individuals in a group are able to teach others in the group about these evolved limitations of group behavior, then it should become easier to manage the group more effectively - this is how we should try to improve the democratic process!
Reality delivered with intelligence and flare. Thanks.
The notion of a Lottocracy is a SERIOUSLY underrated idea. There's no perfect system but we can do better than democracy.
Great piece—nice work.
Shareholder votes make far more sense to me -- proportionate with exposure. It is weird to have net transfer beneficiaries get to vote in the elections that decide how much more free stuff they get. Letting them vote on fiscal profligacy would be like allowing short sellers to vote in corporate elections. They're on the other side. It would be in inherent and obvious conflict of interest.
This was entertaining to read and certainly contains some truth, but nonetheless I think it is overly cynical about group behavior, and then simultaneously not cynical enough about your preferred systems/ideologies and "crowds".
In defense of group behavior, it provides the conditions under which the good kinds of "crowds" can emerge (or be regulated into existence). You gesture at this with the traffic light example, but I don't think fully examine its implications. We need rigid rules to coordinate around in order to have a predictable, orderly society where positive sum exchanges can routinely occur. A hypothetical pure crowd with no group-based order around it incentivizes violence, fraud, and abuse of unequal power dynamics.
Compare labor conditions in the early industrial revolution to the post-New Deal era. What broke those were group-based labor unions and political parties advocating for blunt policies like the 40-hour workweek, OSHA, bans on child labor, and the minimum wage. I don't see any other realistic way for the downsides of industrial capitalism to have been curbed. It wasn't going to organically emerge via some "crowd" deliberating on it, and the market itself did not deliver it.
You often need blunt instruments to shove a crowd out of an undesirable equilibrium. Sure, you can imagine a more efficient and intellectually satisfying system of Pigouvian Taxes, but those don't actually solve any of the political "group" problems you mention, because we'd still have to decide what harms count and how to measure them. It's very easy to imagine them not working in practice.
So I think you aren't cynical enough about crowds. Even setting aside coercion and fraud, crowds often converge on stupid policies and bad values. For example, you cite NIMBYism as "group" behavior, but actually it seems to me that a lot of NIMBYism emerges through crowd-like behavior. The more local you go, and the more voice individuals have, the more NIMBY the politics are. In fact, YIMBYs have been trying to make the issue of housing more group-oriented (and the YIMBY movement is a much more coherent "group" than NIMBYs, who seem more dispersed and localized). It turns out that blunt, group-oriented state politics are more conducive to good policy outcomes on housing. Why? Because focusing on the blunt goal of "affordable housing and economic growth good" is better than some nuanced deliberative process of local residents who, usually, converge on the idea that they don't want change and like their city the way it is thank you very much. Most people are NIMBYs when the develop is literally in their backyard.
"a group just is a collection of individuals with a shared identity, agenda, narrative, and strategy. What else would a group be?"
yes, so everyone is in several groups, since no one is a singular individual with a separately bootstrapped identity, agenda, narrative and strategy. crowds *just* are groups of different sizes, since humans are hypersocially interdependent by coercive default, courtesy of earth biochemistry/physics.
*constitutively interdependent, and not just with other humans, but with several other species and non-living phenomena. the unphysical, idealized fiction of 'the rational individual' is a bizarre non-explanation.
I personally like a constitutional republic with a constitution that upholds individual rights such as life, liberty and property. The leaders are democratically elected, but their powers are limited by the constitution.
Nice work, this guy gets it. Democracy is the ultimate form of moral outsourcing and the ultimate scapegoat for everything that is wrong in our lives. What's it going to look like in 10 years when a strong plurality of folks have cognitively offloaded and atrophied themselves into effectively a mental disorder while continuing to be encouraged to try to force their preferences onto their neighbors? It's gonna get real weird.
If individuals in a group are able to teach others in the group about these evolved limitations of group behavior, then it should become easier to manage the group more effectively - this is how we should try to improve the democratic process!