Does this actually apply here? I agree that Chesterton’s Fence can be misapplied in cases where there isn’t selection pressure, but it seems to me that aristocracy of that era would have had pressure towards running an efficient state through the greater potential for civil unrest or military threats under poor management. Its evolution would be an inefficient process, but not random.
No, you’re right that aristocracy is more complicated. There were lots of pressures that shaped the form of it. Certainly more than how good of managers aristocrats made!
An invalid syllogism: “The rules of aristocracy were shaped by forces. Avoiding poor management is a force. Therefore, the rules of aristocracy will be all about avoiding poor management.”
Aristocrats were also selected for how well they could extract rents from those below, and how well they could resist rent-extraction from above, both alone and collectively. Nor was the top-down pressure all about making aristocrats into productive managers—rent-extraction has been mentioned, and also weakening the aristocracy to secure central power, allowing advancement via marriage and alliance, various human status games, and the need for a legislative arm of government.
I don’t want to hear the One Pressure That Explains Everything (but only qualitatively, and if you squint). I’ll want to hear when they have the dozen pressures that make up a model that can be quantitatively fit to past data by tuning some parameters, including good retrodictive accuracy over a held-out time period.
Does this actually apply here? I agree that Chesterton’s Fence can be misapplied in cases where there isn’t selection pressure, but it seems to me that aristocracy of that era would have had pressure towards running an efficient state through the greater potential for civil unrest or military threats under poor management. Its evolution would be an inefficient process, but not random.
Or have I misunderstood your point?
No, you’re right that aristocracy is more complicated. There were lots of pressures that shaped the form of it. Certainly more than how good of managers aristocrats made!
An invalid syllogism: “The rules of aristocracy were shaped by forces. Avoiding poor management is a force. Therefore, the rules of aristocracy will be all about avoiding poor management.”
Aristocrats were also selected for how well they could extract rents from those below, and how well they could resist rent-extraction from above, both alone and collectively. Nor was the top-down pressure all about making aristocrats into productive managers—rent-extraction has been mentioned, and also weakening the aristocracy to secure central power, allowing advancement via marriage and alliance, various human status games, and the need for a legislative arm of government.
I don’t want to hear the One Pressure That Explains Everything (but only qualitatively, and if you squint). I’ll want to hear when they have the dozen pressures that make up a model that can be quantitatively fit to past data by tuning some parameters, including good retrodictive accuracy over a held-out time period.