One last comment/reminder to myself: I read nostalgebrist’s summary of Weyl’s “Why I am not a technocrat” argument (haven’t read the original yet), and his last few points seem very relevant to my argument:
8. What needs to be true for a mechanism to be open to modification by the masses? For one thing, the masses need to understand what the mechanism is! This is clearly not sufficient but it at least seems necessary.
9. Elites should design mechanisms that are simple and transparent enough for the masses to inspect and comprehend. This goal (“legibility”) trades off against fidelity, which tends to favor illegible models.
10. But the elite’s mechanisms will always have problems with insufficient fidelity, because they miss information known to the masses (#3). The way out of this is not to add ever more fidelity as viewed from the elite POV. We have to let the masses fill in the missing fidelity on their own.
And this will requires more legibility (#8), which will come at the cost of short-term fidelity (#9). It will pay off in fidelity gains over the long term as mass intervention supplies the “missing” fidelity.
I take this to be the central piece of advice articulated in the essay.
One last comment/reminder to myself: I read nostalgebrist’s summary of Weyl’s “Why I am not a technocrat” argument (haven’t read the original yet), and his last few points seem very relevant to my argument: