As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning. Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.
This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone. And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
"almost all controversy would be removed from among Philosophers, if they were always to agree as to the meaning of words" (c)
One could say it was always the case, you can cut through bs and have a productive dialogue if you define the meaning of words before the message, i.e. scientific papers do that. The problem with that is that most people won't do it because its hard and on the other end you will get ostracized most of the time if you try doing that in casual conversations. This problem is even bigger in politics which is a game of large numbers and you have to be as stupid as possible for your message to reach the masses.
Another example (this is a hard one imo) "discrimination". It is used in the US in an important legal document, a part of a powerful legal social right.
It's both the NEGATIVE and unjust social process of dividing minorities, often segregating them away from the resource-plenty enjoyed by majorities -- basic 'good favor', low prices, neighborhoods with food oases.
And it's also the POSITIVE or NEUTRAL term of "making a fine distinction and discerning". Such as, "The experienced journalist listened intently to the politician's statement, applying a keen sense of intellectual discrimination. She was able to quickly discern the subtle ways in which key facts were being selectively highlighted and crucial context was being omitted, allowing her to call out the misrepresentation rather than accepting the narrative at face value." (gen'd by ai <3)
It was once an efficient term for identifying careful critical thinking. I speculate we do less of this as we have fewer words to do this with, nowadays.
I suppose "bigot" and "bigotry" ought to have been used by the US when it made its civil rights advancements.
We designed the civil rights code so as to be least unacceptable to bigots. They feel that bigotry is an unalienable right, and to be honest, it took some serious rereading of the Constitution to not make it so.
Even now they are finding that the Constitution does not in fact allow civil rights, and the Civil Rights Act is being pared away.
You can call it out by whatever name you want, but in the end a lot of Americans want that and you don't have the overwhelming political force required to override them.
The one small upside: they'll tell you that you're only making it worse by name calling. That's not actually true. It may not make things better, but it is not the cause of it. Arguing about words is just a common tactic to get you to stop talking about the actual subject.
When the state cannot get rid of a popular idea that benefits the people, the state puts on a mask with that idea and then hollows it out. The most cartoonish example is the "democratic" republic of north korea.
> As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning.
Words don't have objective meanings. Words are indirect references to ideas in your head. They are like named memory addresses that can be de-referenced. That's why "woke" can have different meanings to different groups of people who speak together. Words are sociologically derived, not objectively meaningful. Eventually these words can even become shibboleths which can be used to determine whether you are part of a group or not.
People deeply underestimate the power of linguistics, especially in the hands of those who wish to exploit it. Control/influence over language and it's mapping is political power.
> As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning.
I don’t know for who the literacy is declining. But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia.[1] So it’s the educated that narrow and widen definitions.
> Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.
That’s not true. When people talk about “democratizing X” where X is distant from the political process they mean people participation and power. Like “democratizing social media” could mean user-controlled and driven social media as opposed to everything being controlled a by corporation or something.
> This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
Pretty much true.
> This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
Pretty much. That there are a group of people who can ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people means (by its very premise) that there is no democracy.[2]
People who then might have tolerated that then have enough and turn to the correct political theory: elites rule the commoners. Again the premise proves the theory correct.
> This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone.
This is a bit of a vulgar[3] conception of democratization. Democracy is about power, not access to X. If a car indirectly gives you political power by being able to travel and organize then it indirectly has that effect. But if it only gives you the opportunity to commute one hour each way to your workplace then it has got nothing to do with democratization.
And if your phone just makes you addicted to social media—as the technologists on this board so smugly like to point out—then it doesn’t give you power.
> And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
Democracy is about governing your own life in harmony with the rest of the people under that democracy. The political system is a big deal there. But there are other spheres of life the workplace.[4]
[1] Parochial way of referring to relatively wealthy people who set the intellectual agenda
[2] Although people can call it “liberal democracy” if they want since the Liberal in that is much more important to the system (according to its defenders) than the Democracy part
> "But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia."
Are you a time-traveler or something? Nowadays the language is shaped by privately owned bot farms and media - be it social or legacy. They work for pay, the truth is social or not for pay, etc. "The educated intelligentsia" is being defunded and investigated to help them shut up sooner.
I'm a fan of Joseph Tainter's analysis around organization of societies and issues around collapse being related to diminishing marginal returns. I think there's a lot to that position when you look at the general political party agendas. Technocratic solutions trying to squeeze more blood from the stone while providing less and less to participants (I have less of a theory on effectiveness for any given action, this is more of an observation).
some time ago i discovered Wardley maps [1] (about company's "landscape" and strategy there), and one thing that stick with me was this:
there are 4 levels/stages of development there - genesis, custom-built, product, commodity. With three transitions, made by different kind of people - Pioneers, Settlers, Town-planners. And the last one, mass-production, is about "ruthless removal of deviation".
i guess these "diminishing returns" in keeping long-time same-thing (democracy?) have something in common with the removal of deviations/variety..
The degeneration of American democracy seems an obvious conclusion to the basic premise set out there. Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system, and therefore when they lose power, they can be assured they will gain it back again in a few years once people become dissatisfied with the alternative. There is no incentive for parties to better themselves because being bad at their job nets them valuable and necessary private donations from lobbyists with an interest in disabling the proper function of government.
> Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system
Yes, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists know that they cannot be replaced because of the two party system. (Likewise, neither faces the threat of, if it fails to be replaced, being completely re-oriented in a political realignment.) It's not as if, currently, scholars disagree about whether the US is in its Sixth or Seventh Party system -- the two major parties are dominant, stable, and forever unchanging.
Do you think "political parties in America never change" is a steel man interpretation of my comment? I would suggest there is material difference between my statement "the parties have little electoral incentive to change" and your interpretation "they do not change". In my view, the latter is hyperbolic but reasonable, and the former is outright true. The parties would clearly not act as they do if people had other options to vote for.
Most countries with multi party systems use different methods for selecting their representatives. When you do a straight aggregation of geographical areas in which you take whomever gets the most votes in each area (sometimes called first past the post) it becomes possible for the most disliked party in a country to win, widely geographical distributed concerns (like ecological concerns) become underrepresented, and most relevant to this conversation, having multiple parties that are close to each other is a huge disadvantage compared to having a single party attracting more people. Because of this, countries with this system will usually see smaller parties merge and stabilise on a 2 party government / opposition set up.
The study of how different kinds of voting systems work and their advantages, disadvantages and consequences is called social choice theory. There's an interesting theorem called Arrow's theorem that proves that given a certain set of assumptions, there can be no voting system that works exactly as we would like. Sometimes this is used to argue that all systems are equally bad, but I think this is not true at all - even while imperfect, some systems are much better than others.
Previous to 1988 the League of Women Voters[0] handled presidential debates. A fully independent outside organization.
Since then, the Commission on Presidential Debates[1] set rules for admittance to president debates. The CPD was founded jointly by Republicans and Democrats and is controlled solely by both parties.
At best, there _appears_ to be a large, gaping conflict of interest when it comes to admitting candidates to presidential debates. In 1992 Ross Perot was invited to the debates as a third option. In 1996 Clinton and Dole successfully argued for Perot to be excluded from the debates as he had no "realistic chance to win" [2]. Perot aside, what happened was downright anti-democratic and further enforced the two party system.
Now that I'm on this...I'll do another example of this abuse of power. Candidates from third parties have been arrested for protesting outside presidential debates [3,4]. Even if the protests broke the law, arresting opponents for asking to be given a podium to speak at feels bad.
First-past-the-post tend to lead to two-party systems while proportional representation tend to lead to multi-party systems. But you can’t have proportional representation in presidental elections since only one candidate can win. Countries with multi-party systems tend to have parlimentary systems.
Because the legislature uses single member districts with essentially either majority, plurality, or some form of two-round runoff elections, and the executive uses indirect elections where the electors are (for the largest part) elected as statewide at-large slates by winner-take-all plurality. This makes, outside of very unusual circumstances, voting for other than one of the two leading parties ineffective in the normal case, and where it has any effect most likely it will shift the result from the least-unacceptable of the major parties to the most.
Many European countries use varieties of proportional representation (most commonly either party list proportional or mixed member proportional), and have a parliamentary system (so that there is not a separately-elected executive administration -- there may be an elected President but they tend to be a head of state and not head of government -- whereas in the US the executive election is even more heavily tilted to support two-party dominance than the legislative system, though the legislative election system is still the more important piece of the problem.)
While I normally keep the political threads at arms length, this is an interesting enough game/voting-theory question that I'm honestly surprised no one has linked the fact that this is a well-studied effect, to the point that it has a specific name: Duverger's Law. [0]
The European systems, I'd argue are absolutely worse than many of the "direct republic" systems in the US and other American countries because in the European systems there's a pretense of "consensus" reaching and it mostly ends up preserving an elite status quo and hiding any problems. That's why there's such a big tendency of nanny stating and censorship. It's entrenched in a bureocratic way.
The direct vote gets a better chance at subverting the system radically and that's a good thing. Regardless of criticism from the losers about "populism". The end result is great for democracy and actual change.
reading about Eno's ideas on organization and variety makes me want to share some perspectives directly from my experience with music performance practice, specifically in live coding.
For a long time, the common practice in live coding, which you might see on platforms like Flok.cc (https://flok.cc) supporting various interesting languages, has been like this: Everyone gets their own 'space' or editor. From there, they send messages to a central audio server to control their own sound synthesis.
This is heavily influenced by architectures like SuperCollider's client-server model, where the server is seen as a neutral entity.
Crucially, this relies a lot on social rules, not system guarantees. You could technically control someone else's track, or even mute everything. People generally restrain themselves.
A downside is that one person's error can sometimes crash the entire server for everyone.
Later, while developing my own live coding language, Glicol (https://glicol.org), I started exploring a different approach, beginning with a very naive version:
I implemented a shared editor, much like Google Docs. Everyone types in the same space, and what you see is (ideally) what you hear, a direct code-to-sound mapping.
The problems with this naive system were significant. You couldn't even reliably re-run the code, because you couldn't guarantee if a teammate was halfway through typing 0.1 (maybe they only typed 0.) or had only typed part of a keyword.
So, I improved the Glicol system: We still use a shared interface for coding, but there's a kind of consensus mechanism. When you press Cmd+Enter (or equivalent), the code doesn't execute instantly. Instead, it's like raising your hand – it signals "I'm ready". The code only updates after everyone involved has signaled they are ready. This gives the last person to signal 'ready' a bit more responsibility to ensure the musical code change makes sense.
I'm just sharing these experiences from the music-making side, without judgment on which approach is better.
> Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.
Brilliant, and provides a foundation for an idea that I've seen elsewhere: that the true test of a new democracy is not the first democratic elections, but the first transition of power, i.e. the first subsequent election where the incumbent loses.
Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.
Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.
It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
I enjoyed the article but it could be clearer and more concise.
In TFA, the author wrote:
Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.
The essence is that all participants must be co-operative in their education, motives, and intentions. And this requires a system of reliable information and agreed laws.
Democracy works within the tolerances of reliable information, demonstrable co-operation, and the rule of law.
The US implosion is not yet irreparable, but it is a societal failure.
It also explicitly requires the parties and candidates to think beyond the current election cycle. That behavior is not in evidence for at least one major party in the U.S.
A candidate's personal expectation of costs must also be factored in. When a candidate faces criminal charges (to pick an example totally out of the blue) if they lose but can eliminate those if they win, the calculus changes for them.
we would not have this narrow vision of losers/winners IF the inequalities were reduced, it would not be as strong as it is today in our world view if this parameter was adjusted.
In turns, "winners" would not feel like they are at the verge of loosing it all, constantly, because the wealth they generate would be stored into a living organism (a nation, or else). like having multiple bank accounts, with multiple currencies, that one being .... bio-economic i guess.
democracy does not work. Or first, we should clarify the meaning of "it works". IMO, it did not prevented us from burning the world, this is sufficient to say that in a parallel universe i would bet differently.
And there are actually more flavors of democracy that have been used to break this death spiral:
- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;
- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
Does the Roman republic's tradition of appointing a dictator count? Do "illiberal democracies" with quasi-kings like Orban, Erdogan, Maduro, et al, still count as something comparable, or are these the downside of that spiral? Obviously everything that works, works until it doesn't.
I think random selection would be really cool. Imagine if some fraction of our representatives were chosen at random. Not enough to be the majority, maybe something like 1/3, but enough to have a real effect.
The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.
> This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
This depends one whether you consider the existence of a political class to be purely negative.
Seems like random selection of candidates who have no influence over what happens after their term selects for all the negative aspects of a political class (ability to enrich themselves and their friends at others expense, tendency to be ignorant of and ambivalent about issues that don't really affect them) and against the [at least arguably] positive aspects (institutional knowledge of how things operate, some sort of political philosophy which has some public support, some level of skill and drive to get things done, and the motivation to try to keep the public happy enough to reelect them or their compatriots)
My understanding has always been that one of the "killer apps" of democracy as a system of government is peaceful transfer of power. It seems like one of those "nobody asks what the old software did well" questions; so many people (i.e. Americans) are so used to the idea of peaceful transfer of power that we don't ever think about what a major achievement it is, and how dependent on it everything we take for granted is.
Another advantage of democracy is a source of popular legitimacy for the government, which helps prevent coups. Dictatorships struggle with this, and have to apply other countermeasures to prevent coups.
Unless a dictator is some kind of super-popular national hero or has managed to convince everyone that they have a divine right to rule, they depend on the support of a group of elites to maintain their power, and have no choice but to prevent other ambitious people from concentrating power themselves. This means that even in cases where the dictator happens to be wise, skillful, and benevolent, their regime will suffer from corruption and fragility, because they have to keep doing favors for their support group to keep them loyal or else risk a coup.
Being a dictator is a position that tends to invite well-grounded paranoia and suspicion, because you know that ambitious and bloodthirsty people want your job. So you need to keep files on people.
They can't defer too much independent authority to talented bureaucrats or military generals or private business leaders, at least not without some guarantees on their loyalty, or else they run the risk of those people attempting to seize power. They can mitigate this by developing a cult of personality, but that makes it impossible to gracefully admit mistakes, and in conflict with maintaining a free press.
And the benefits derived from that. When the consequence for the elites of losing the fight for political power is being targeted personally, imprisoned, or even killed, it makes them cling to power using much more brutal and violent means to avoid this fate, which means more repression for the average folk as well - no dissent can be tolerated. In a modern liberal democracy, they know that they can lose an election cycle without losing their head.
This is why things are so concerning in US - we've already lost this benefit, even though the elections are still genuinely free for now. I don't think they will remain so for long now that the stakes for their losers are so high.
> Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.
You could look at it that way if you believe that there is a unique right policy answer and government is the solution to finding it, but that's not what democracy and separation of powers are about, in terms og why they have historically been adopted. It can certainly be viewed as a reason to prefer democracy and separation of powers.
But, really, democracy is about people having the right to make their own decisions and how to incorporate that into a collective government (or, more cynically, about people rebelling when they feel they have been deprived of that right and how to prevent it for the sake of domestic peace), and separation of powers is about protecting democracy by preventing the concentration of power in a particular institution within a representative democacy being leveraged to make a dictatorship.
This assumes ruling parties start out as “good” but becomes “bad” over time. A more pragmatic view is that different people and different interests have different ideas about what is good and what is bad, and politics is the stuggle between these viewpoints.
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain". Stay in power long enough and you are likely to become the villain, because power corrupts many people.
So people who stay in power may have the wrong policy (because their approach quit working), or they may just become corrupt. Either way, there needs to be a way to get rid of them that is more peaceful than assassination or civil war.
Feedback accepted and acted upon by those in power is what any country really needs. Uncertainty for those in power means they would take feedack. Democracy give each person over a certain age a vote and a stake in the outcome. Populism promises anything, including the impossible to draw in votes. Fascism herds the voters by scaring them away from the opposition - an easy benchmark is to check if you know anyone directly who has been impacted by the "scares" they promote. Autocrats accept feedback by only those who pay them with political or financial favors. They may use any of the above methods to gain power and then use violence and complete control of media to retain it.
Readit News
This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone. And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
One could say it was always the case, you can cut through bs and have a productive dialogue if you define the meaning of words before the message, i.e. scientific papers do that. The problem with that is that most people won't do it because its hard and on the other end you will get ostracized most of the time if you try doing that in casual conversations. This problem is even bigger in politics which is a game of large numbers and you have to be as stupid as possible for your message to reach the masses.
Another example (this is a hard one imo) "discrimination". It is used in the US in an important legal document, a part of a powerful legal social right.
It's both the NEGATIVE and unjust social process of dividing minorities, often segregating them away from the resource-plenty enjoyed by majorities -- basic 'good favor', low prices, neighborhoods with food oases.
And it's also the POSITIVE or NEUTRAL term of "making a fine distinction and discerning". Such as, "The experienced journalist listened intently to the politician's statement, applying a keen sense of intellectual discrimination. She was able to quickly discern the subtle ways in which key facts were being selectively highlighted and crucial context was being omitted, allowing her to call out the misrepresentation rather than accepting the narrative at face value." (gen'd by ai <3)
It was once an efficient term for identifying careful critical thinking. I speculate we do less of this as we have fewer words to do this with, nowadays.
I suppose "bigot" and "bigotry" ought to have been used by the US when it made its civil rights advancements.
Even now they are finding that the Constitution does not in fact allow civil rights, and the Civil Rights Act is being pared away.
You can call it out by whatever name you want, but in the end a lot of Americans want that and you don't have the overwhelming political force required to override them.
The one small upside: they'll tell you that you're only making it worse by name calling. That's not actually true. It may not make things better, but it is not the cause of it. Arguing about words is just a common tactic to get you to stop talking about the actual subject.
I checked ngram viewer, and it showed this document from 1937 that first used it in that context:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Jews_Jobs_and_Discrimin...
Deleted Comment
When the state cannot get rid of a popular idea that benefits the people, the state puts on a mask with that idea and then hollows it out. The most cartoonish example is the "democratic" republic of north korea.
Words don't have objective meanings. Words are indirect references to ideas in your head. They are like named memory addresses that can be de-referenced. That's why "woke" can have different meanings to different groups of people who speak together. Words are sociologically derived, not objectively meaningful. Eventually these words can even become shibboleths which can be used to determine whether you are part of a group or not.
People deeply underestimate the power of linguistics, especially in the hands of those who wish to exploit it. Control/influence over language and it's mapping is political power.
Power sure, but knowledge? Nope. If anything it’s the opposite.
I don’t know for who the literacy is declining. But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia.[1] So it’s the educated that narrow and widen definitions.
> Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.
That’s not true. When people talk about “democratizing X” where X is distant from the political process they mean people participation and power. Like “democratizing social media” could mean user-controlled and driven social media as opposed to everything being controlled a by corporation or something.
> This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
Pretty much true.
> This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
Pretty much. That there are a group of people who can ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people means (by its very premise) that there is no democracy.[2]
People who then might have tolerated that then have enough and turn to the correct political theory: elites rule the commoners. Again the premise proves the theory correct.
> This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone.
This is a bit of a vulgar[3] conception of democratization. Democracy is about power, not access to X. If a car indirectly gives you political power by being able to travel and organize then it indirectly has that effect. But if it only gives you the opportunity to commute one hour each way to your workplace then it has got nothing to do with democratization.
And if your phone just makes you addicted to social media—as the technologists on this board so smugly like to point out—then it doesn’t give you power.
> And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
Democracy is about governing your own life in harmony with the rest of the people under that democracy. The political system is a big deal there. But there are other spheres of life the workplace.[4]
[1] Parochial way of referring to relatively wealthy people who set the intellectual agenda
[2] Although people can call it “liberal democracy” if they want since the Liberal in that is much more important to the system (according to its defenders) than the Democracy part
[3] Tongue in cheek!
[4] Referring to socialism
Are you a time-traveler or something? Nowadays the language is shaped by privately owned bot farms and media - be it social or legacy. They work for pay, the truth is social or not for pay, etc. "The educated intelligentsia" is being defunded and investigated to help them shut up sooner.
* But there are other spheres of life like the workplace.
Dead Comment
https://risk.princeton.edu/img/Historical_Collapse_Resources...
some time ago i discovered Wardley maps [1] (about company's "landscape" and strategy there), and one thing that stick with me was this:
there are 4 levels/stages of development there - genesis, custom-built, product, commodity. With three transitions, made by different kind of people - Pioneers, Settlers, Town-planners. And the last one, mass-production, is about "ruthless removal of deviation".
i guess these "diminishing returns" in keeping long-time same-thing (democracy?) have something in common with the removal of deviations/variety..
[1] https://feststelltaste.github.io/wardley-maps-book/#_the_fir...
Yes, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists know that they cannot be replaced because of the two party system. (Likewise, neither faces the threat of, if it fails to be replaced, being completely re-oriented in a political realignment.) It's not as if, currently, scholars disagree about whether the US is in its Sixth or Seventh Party system -- the two major parties are dominant, stable, and forever unchanging.
The study of how different kinds of voting systems work and their advantages, disadvantages and consequences is called social choice theory. There's an interesting theorem called Arrow's theorem that proves that given a certain set of assumptions, there can be no voting system that works exactly as we would like. Sometimes this is used to argue that all systems are equally bad, but I think this is not true at all - even while imperfect, some systems are much better than others.
Previous to 1988 the League of Women Voters[0] handled presidential debates. A fully independent outside organization.
Since then, the Commission on Presidential Debates[1] set rules for admittance to president debates. The CPD was founded jointly by Republicans and Democrats and is controlled solely by both parties.
At best, there _appears_ to be a large, gaping conflict of interest when it comes to admitting candidates to presidential debates. In 1992 Ross Perot was invited to the debates as a third option. In 1996 Clinton and Dole successfully argued for Perot to be excluded from the debates as he had no "realistic chance to win" [2]. Perot aside, what happened was downright anti-democratic and further enforced the two party system.
Now that I'm on this...I'll do another example of this abuse of power. Candidates from third parties have been arrested for protesting outside presidential debates [3,4]. Even if the protests broke the law, arresting opponents for asking to be given a podium to speak at feels bad.
---
[0] https://www.lwv.org
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Deb...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/18/p...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-s...
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3740146.stm
Many European countries use varieties of proportional representation (most commonly either party list proportional or mixed member proportional), and have a parliamentary system (so that there is not a separately-elected executive administration -- there may be an elected President but they tend to be a head of state and not head of government -- whereas in the US the executive election is even more heavily tilted to support two-party dominance than the legislative system, though the legislative election system is still the more important piece of the problem.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
The direct vote gets a better chance at subverting the system radically and that's a good thing. Regardless of criticism from the losers about "populism". The end result is great for democracy and actual change.
Edit: I get that people downvote this comment since it's always controversial to ask.
I personally always ask when I am more curious about the answer and am willing to burn any potential karma over it.
Asking for feedback is more important.
I'm just genuinely surprised about the other one.
For a long time, the common practice in live coding, which you might see on platforms like Flok.cc (https://flok.cc) supporting various interesting languages, has been like this: Everyone gets their own 'space' or editor. From there, they send messages to a central audio server to control their own sound synthesis.
This is heavily influenced by architectures like SuperCollider's client-server model, where the server is seen as a neutral entity.
Crucially, this relies a lot on social rules, not system guarantees. You could technically control someone else's track, or even mute everything. People generally restrain themselves.
A downside is that one person's error can sometimes crash the entire server for everyone.
Later, while developing my own live coding language, Glicol (https://glicol.org), I started exploring a different approach, beginning with a very naive version: I implemented a shared editor, much like Google Docs. Everyone types in the same space, and what you see is (ideally) what you hear, a direct code-to-sound mapping.
The problems with this naive system were significant. You couldn't even reliably re-run the code, because you couldn't guarantee if a teammate was halfway through typing 0.1 (maybe they only typed 0.) or had only typed part of a keyword.
So, I improved the Glicol system: We still use a shared interface for coding, but there's a kind of consensus mechanism. When you press Cmd+Enter (or equivalent), the code doesn't execute instantly. Instead, it's like raising your hand – it signals "I'm ready". The code only updates after everyone involved has signaled they are ready. This gives the last person to signal 'ready' a bit more responsibility to ensure the musical code change makes sense.
I'm just sharing these experiences from the music-making side, without judgment on which approach is better.
Brilliant, and provides a foundation for an idea that I've seen elsewhere: that the true test of a new democracy is not the first democratic elections, but the first transition of power, i.e. the first subsequent election where the incumbent loses.
Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.
It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
In TFA, the author wrote:
The essence is that all participants must be co-operative in their education, motives, and intentions. And this requires a system of reliable information and agreed laws.Democracy works within the tolerances of reliable information, demonstrable co-operation, and the rule of law.
The US implosion is not yet irreparable, but it is a societal failure.
Even if democracy in some strict sense means that majority decides, you still need to care about the minorities to keep the system credible.
Otherwise any minority will soon realize that they will never win and break out of the system.
A candidate's personal expectation of costs must also be factored in. When a candidate faces criminal charges (to pick an example totally out of the blue) if they lose but can eliminate those if they win, the calculus changes for them.
democracy does not work. Or first, we should clarify the meaning of "it works". IMO, it did not prevented us from burning the world, this is sufficient to say that in a parallel universe i would bet differently.
- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;
- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.
This depends one whether you consider the existence of a political class to be purely negative.
Seems like random selection of candidates who have no influence over what happens after their term selects for all the negative aspects of a political class (ability to enrich themselves and their friends at others expense, tendency to be ignorant of and ambivalent about issues that don't really affect them) and against the [at least arguably] positive aspects (institutional knowledge of how things operate, some sort of political philosophy which has some public support, some level of skill and drive to get things done, and the motivation to try to keep the public happy enough to reelect them or their compatriots)
Unless a dictator is some kind of super-popular national hero or has managed to convince everyone that they have a divine right to rule, they depend on the support of a group of elites to maintain their power, and have no choice but to prevent other ambitious people from concentrating power themselves. This means that even in cases where the dictator happens to be wise, skillful, and benevolent, their regime will suffer from corruption and fragility, because they have to keep doing favors for their support group to keep them loyal or else risk a coup.
Being a dictator is a position that tends to invite well-grounded paranoia and suspicion, because you know that ambitious and bloodthirsty people want your job. So you need to keep files on people.
They can't defer too much independent authority to talented bureaucrats or military generals or private business leaders, at least not without some guarantees on their loyalty, or else they run the risk of those people attempting to seize power. They can mitigate this by developing a cult of personality, but that makes it impossible to gracefully admit mistakes, and in conflict with maintaining a free press.
This is why things are so concerning in US - we've already lost this benefit, even though the elections are still genuinely free for now. I don't think they will remain so for long now that the stakes for their losers are so high.
You could look at it that way if you believe that there is a unique right policy answer and government is the solution to finding it, but that's not what democracy and separation of powers are about, in terms og why they have historically been adopted. It can certainly be viewed as a reason to prefer democracy and separation of powers.
But, really, democracy is about people having the right to make their own decisions and how to incorporate that into a collective government (or, more cynically, about people rebelling when they feel they have been deprived of that right and how to prevent it for the sake of domestic peace), and separation of powers is about protecting democracy by preventing the concentration of power in a particular institution within a representative democacy being leveraged to make a dictatorship.
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain". Stay in power long enough and you are likely to become the villain, because power corrupts many people.
So people who stay in power may have the wrong policy (because their approach quit working), or they may just become corrupt. Either way, there needs to be a way to get rid of them that is more peaceful than assassination or civil war.
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History presents us with far more examples of successful autocracies.
”Although great new ideas are articulated by individuals they are nearly always generated by communities.”
https://archive.org/details/brian-eno-on-basic-income