I agree—and in fact small doses of what Cummings suggests does just look like holding enquiries and firing people, and maybe firing the leadership of a particular organisation (just not like 50% of all govt departments in one go). In fact in my original question to Brennan, I asked
For reasons it might strengthen the argument [in favour of technocracy], it seems like the institutions that did better than average were the ones that were more able to act autonomously, see e.g. this from Alex Tabarok,
and I listed some examples of particular bureaucracies that did well in countries that in general failed (one of which was the vaccine taskforce set up, in part, by Cummings). So clearly it is possible to just get the particular thing right without solving all the systemic issues.
My point was that, if you’ve decided you need wholesale reform of how government makes decisions, doing a complete end-run around most existing institutions to build your ‘startup’ replacements has a much worse downside than e.g. experimenting with epistocracy, because it concentrates power in a really small number of people, while epistocracy doesn’t.
But I don’t think either is what we should be reaching for to solve a particular imminent problem.
I’m not very familiar with Brennan’s work, but I can’t imagine how epistocracy could be feasible in the US...its just an invitation to civil war 2.0.
Edit
JB:For instance, I favor a system of enlightened preference voting where we let everyone vote but we then calculate what the public would have supported had it been fully informed
So...”we” the technocrats recalculate to get whatever result “we” like. And everyone tolerates having their actual vote erased and replaced with what they should have voted for.....yeah.
I agree—and in fact small doses of what Cummings suggests does just look like holding enquiries and firing people, and maybe firing the leadership of a particular organisation (just not like 50% of all govt departments in one go). In fact in my original question to Brennan, I asked
and I listed some examples of particular bureaucracies that did well in countries that in general failed (one of which was the vaccine taskforce set up, in part, by Cummings). So clearly it is possible to just get the particular thing right without solving all the systemic issues.
My point was that, if you’ve decided you need wholesale reform of how government makes decisions, doing a complete end-run around most existing institutions to build your ‘startup’ replacements has a much worse downside than e.g. experimenting with epistocracy, because it concentrates power in a really small number of people, while epistocracy doesn’t.
But I don’t think either is what we should be reaching for to solve a particular imminent problem.
I’m not very familiar with Brennan’s work, but I can’t imagine how epistocracy could be feasible in the US...its just an invitation to civil war 2.0.
Edit
So...”we” the technocrats recalculate to get whatever result “we” like. And everyone tolerates having their actual vote erased and replaced with what they should have voted for.....yeah.