| It all sounds great, doesn't it? Benevolent dictators are great right up until they aren't. Putin was super popular when he was first elected; he stabilised the Russian economy and made life hugely better for most. Then he made himself a little echo chamber of yes-men and eventually came to believe his own propaganda; look where we are now. Certainly he's getting something done, but it is no good thing. Might things have turned out differently if he didn't have completely uncontested control? Britain's first-past-the-post voting system is designed to create strong governments that can get things done. They certainly got things done: after parting ways with their biggest trading partner, a decade of mismanagement by increasingly brazen kleptocrats has completely tanked the economy. Might things have turned out differently if extremists couldn't unilaterally make enormous changes to a population's way of life? Meanwhile, well, Trump. Aren’t we glad the system checked him from turning the most hare-brained of his ideas into reality? Perhaps this is unfair; examples from politics are like shooting fish in a barrel. Let's look at super intelligent businessmen. Just recently, a maverick who thought he was smarter than everyone else built a super innovative submarine. Might that story have had a different outcome if he'd had some sanity checks from someone whose opinion he actually respected? Another one founded a cryptocurrency exchange and a trading firm, and decided he was smarter than everyone else and so it was fine for him to just quietly make huge bets using other people's money. Might that have had a different outcome if he wasn't given unconditional access to a $65bn credit line with no oversight? He's still claiming he did nothing wrong and is an effective altruist to boot. It's for the courts now. Musk himself hasn't the best track record here; just look at Twitter. Musk's other holdings have teams of people whose full time job is to interact with Musk, translating his proclamations into sensible things; with Twitter, however, we get to see the man unfiltered. It's quite a sight. There’s risk/reward to consider here. Experiments are good; change is risk, and no change for the better can happen without risking change for the worse. But if your experiment is of globally significant scale with potentially global consequences, maybe running it by some people willing to honestly speak their mind first isn’t such a terrible plan? |