[elptacek]

There's a somewhat negative cast towards the end of this article where the author discusses "the fundamental inability of most humans to handle such technology responsibly" and how "psychosocial factors" retard progress. And then you have some dire, terminal outlook for humanity. This reads like correspondence bias to me. At first, it seemed contradictory to the first paragraphs of the article, which seemed to be leading up to, "this is another engineering problem and we must analyze it for a solution before we can continue to progress technologically." So I reread the whole thing... and it seems that was just my own bias inserting itself between the lines.

And I still don't understand why the political components of the dynamics of social and technological progress cannot be approached as an engineering problem.

[dkarl]

Engineering requires some coherence of vision. Coherence of vision in society is hard to achieve and probably undesirable -- the best systems of government, in my opinion, are the ones that protect difference and function in spite of it. In other words, if you successfully solve the engineering problem of designing a system of government, the resulting society will not be amenable to social engineering. If society and politics are amenable to engineering, then the system of government is almost certainly poorly designed. In a democratic society you can only achieve coherence through perceived ethnic and cultural uniformity, but that perception is manufactured at great cost to everyone who doesn't fit the imposed national identity.

[elptacek]

All governments appear historically do have been designed by a small group of people with coherence of vision. All of these systems, based on idealism, fail to account for the complex requirements of administrating a functional society. As a result, our "democracy" is incessantly patching itself -- ask any law student. Despite being currently the most popular ideal, democracy is a terrible design. The result is that countries like the United States are definitionally socialist, despite what we prefer to beleive.

I have no criticisms of any form of government. Criticisms have the net effect of polarizing people, which is counterproductive at best. Unfortunately, any discussion of the political component of any dynamic is perceived as criticism, if not an outright attack. The intensity of the reaction to perceived criticism varies greatly from culture to culture. This is horribly unfortunate, because it discourages critical thinking and contributes to these 'psychosocial factors' that retard progress.

Of course, the author assumes that his concept of progress is what is desired. There are a thousand ways one could pick this article apart.

[nazgulnarsil]

only in those traditional forms of governance that are semi-compulsory to one degree or another. free immigration between competing systems of governance allow each unit to have coherence of vision while still allowing people to choose freely about what sort of ideological vision they agree with.

This was a genius political invention. The result was called something like the "unified states", but it was destroyed in a civil war and lost to history. I hear books from that civilization survive, but no one reads them.