The concepts of Unitarism, Centralization, Authoritarianism and top-down seem to be all conveying the same thing, but when you look closely you start to notice the small differences. Why then do we think these concepts are similar? Because implementing them has the same effect: high-risk and high-reward.
We tend to think that authoritarianism etc are inherently bad, but that’s only because the ways you can screw up a situation vastly outnumber the ways in which you can improve a situation. When Scott Alexander talks about an AI overlord taking away your freedom, many people get squeamish. But while the worst dystopias will be top-down, so will the best utopias. Identifying yourself as being inherently pro big-government or anti big-government seems rather counterproductive. It might be better to ask yourself what is this particular top-down system doing in this specific moment in time and temporarily choose a position on the pro-anti scale, even if people accuse you of having no ideology (you don’t need to have an ideology for everything as long as you have an underlying philosophy).
The concepts of Unitarism, Centralization, Authoritarianism and top-down seem to be all conveying the same thing, but when you look closely you start to notice the small differences. Why then do we think these concepts are similar? Because implementing them has the same effect: high-risk and high-reward.
We tend to think that authoritarianism etc are inherently bad, but that’s only because the ways you can screw up a situation vastly outnumber the ways in which you can improve a situation. When Scott Alexander talks about an AI overlord taking away your freedom, many people get squeamish. But while the worst dystopias will be top-down, so will the best utopias. Identifying yourself as being inherently pro big-government or anti big-government seems rather counterproductive. It might be better to ask yourself what is this particular top-down system doing in this specific moment in time and temporarily choose a position on the pro-anti scale, even if people accuse you of having no ideology (you don’t need to have an ideology for everything as long as you have an underlying philosophy).