[martin-t]

Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives.

I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

[k__]

Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right.

No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in.

Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.

[kiba]

Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed.

You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, because appreciation of land means higher taxes.

[andsoitis]

Land is a scarce resource. I don’t know that crating a system to wash that reality away is desirable.

[rcxdude]

Land value tax doesn't remove that, it mostly changes who benefits from that scarcity and more strongly incentivises using that scarce resource productively.

[corimaith]

Japan has relatively cheaper real estate because of their lax zoning laws and frequent earthquakes drive the long term value of construction down. Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.

It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.

[k__]

Better laws/incentives could still pull people out of the housing market.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate.

Isn't this because most of Asia has just copied the western capitalist housing asset monetisation scheme with Japan being the only exception?

[kiba]

What do you mean by monenization scheme?

Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land.

The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements.

So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.

[ericmay]

Japan also has less social mobility - it’s a great country but it’s no paradise.

Homes get torn down all the time because they aren’t worth anything - not exactly environmentally friendly.

Even in America today you have plenty of things worth investing in that don’t have to be homes if you can’t stomach the initial investment. Idk what you envision about replacing investment in homes with “research” though certainly curious to learn more about what you envision.

[rangestransform]

It would be vastly more advantageous to our actual standard of living if housing depreciates, people invested in business that provide something to scoring instead of land, and we could periodically tear down housing and rebuild it for cheap so that people can live in nicer residences

[ericmay]

I think it's very difficult to compare policies in a meaningful way, and be curious to understand why you believe it would be vastly more advantageous to our actual standard of living if housing depreciated, and you could be right, but I don't think your claim that periodically tearing down housing and rebuilding it for cheap means nicer residences. On its face it seems that the opposite is true: cheaper materials means cheaper housing, but not necessarily nicer housing. One way that this claim is suspicious to me is that older houses in the United States are much nicer, if maintained, than newer builds, dollar for dollar and the quality of craftsmanship and materials isn't easy to replicate today. I have actual hardwood planks for flooring. Today if you want "hardwood flooring" it's typically a series of interlocking planks for easy/cheap install (and substantial markup) but not necessarily nice.

And the homes I've seen in Japan personally didn't seem to stand out to me as particularly nice but maybe you have some examples that you are thinking of or a different experience?

[pezezin]

Japan is a really rigid country that values stability, hierarchy and following rules above all else. There is a reason why their economy has been stagnant since 1990.

And yeah, the houses might be cheap, but they are also tiny and most Japanese cities are ugly as sin. Not a great example IMHO.

[maest]

> There is a reason why their economy has been stagnant since 1990.

There are many many reasons that go into explaining an economic outcome.

Reducing everything to a perceived cultural difference is wrong and intellectually uncurious.

[c22]

I think if freedom is a desired trait then your system cannot (will not) be entirely dictated by any design.

[_DeadFred_]

If the pre-freedom systems are so locked in that post-freedom systems can't emerge, are you free?

[roenxi]

Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.

The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.

[Buttons840]

One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.

Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?

Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.

[Yoric]

> There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.

I'm not certain.

Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.

I'm less familiar with other examples.

[M95D]

> Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book.

Link?

> We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.

Open up a git for the book and let the people do PRs and bug reports. One file per article.

[martin-t]

And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone.

Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences.

The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs.

Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries.

I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess.

And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.

[kjkjadksj]

Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.

[ch4s3]

File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.

[mantas]

Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.

[andrepd]

Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy.

It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol

[mantas]

But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.

[pqtyw]

> giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money

How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.

In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.

e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?

[ch4s3]

My criticism is of banning campaigning, it's a an engineers solution to a complex web of problems they don't understand.

[kjkjadksj]

Well that isn’t a very compelling argument unless you get a lot more specific.

[pqtyw]

And most party funding comes from the government which favours party which are already in power? Not that this is a horrible system but it does have rather obvious downsides.

e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep their grip on power.

You win the election, you tweak the system to make it easier for you to win next time, you get more funding and your opponents less. Rinse and repeat and you can weaken the opposition to such an extent that you can stay in power more or less indefinitely. That's what Orban or Erdogan are doing.

Another option is you spend a lot of money, win, then change the rules to ban or limit external funding so that nobody else can do that to challenge you.

[mantas]

So far government does u-turn after each election so it looks like there’s enough safeguards to make sure formula stays sane. Maybe it would be a problem if private citizen funding was fully banned. But now that’s allowed with a cap to avoid fraud.

And in our case the alternative is Russian money making it into politics. Which is exactly what could lead to issues.

[kjkjadksj]

If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.

[sokoloff]

Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.

What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?

Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.

[kjkjadksj]

Well that doesn’t happen currently so it probably won’t happen in this scenario. Nor does it really happen in countries that have implemented bans on private campaign financing.

[ch4s3]

Propaganda is definitionally just strategic spread of information. You shouldn't expect people to turn their brains off just because you've said propaganda. Any political speech done with forethought and intent is propaganda.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Are stump speeches not propaganda? I don't see why the election system should privilege candidates whose political views are most compellingly expressed in quick little text blurbs.

[kjkjadksj]

That is how the system already works. Tv and social media soundbites are king, rather than substance.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don’t think that’s true? There are exceptions, but Mike Johnson or Chuck Schumer aren’t successful because they’re getting really good zingers on social media.

[kjkjadksj]

I mean, that is exactly why people even know their names. You think people actually read schumers policy positions on his website? Maybe a single digit percentage do. Most everyone just blindly picks the party line option even on primaries usually the party endorsed candidate wins.

[bee_rider]

I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials.

But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.

What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…

I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.

[pqtyw]

Or complete stagnation and entrenchment of current political class and their networks. Not that its necessarily not the case anyway but it would be very heard for anyone outside the system to break in.

[martin-t]

That's why term limits exist.

Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions.

IMO:

1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals.

2) Term limits should apply to many more positions.

3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.

[pqtyw]

Its tricky, though. There might be people who are doing a perfectly good job and kicking them arbitrarily might be suboptimal.

Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing.

But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well..

> The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town)

Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.

[jahewson]

Being able to give a good speech is merit when the goal is to select a leader.

[yepitwas]

Strongly disagree, in the age of teleprompters and speech writers this is a major part of campaigns (because of TV) but hardly matters at all for actual governing. Our excessive focus on it is not helping us select better leaders.

[lotsofpulp]

I used to think that, before 2016. Apparently, incoherent rambling is also a successful strategy.

[esafak]

Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist (2004) https://vimeo.com/90583017

[kjkjadksj]

Initial debates usually feature all serious candidates anyhow. Advertisement aka propaganda draws a line for me.

[roenxi]

> Banning campaigning would go a long way.

With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.

[kjkjadksj]

And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?

[roenxi]

If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.

[close04]

Routine governance in Stalin’s time is what we now call Stalinism. “Just the way we do things” doesn’t tell you much about the quality. Unlimited campaign spending has a huge potential to consolidate power and allow more spe ding in a positive feedback loop.

[TFYS]

I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.

[argo_navis]

The problem is that whatever system we come up with in theory, will have to be built in practice out of people, and there is never any shortage of people who will happily abuse the system and fellow people out of greed or delusion. That's why an AI overlord arising and taking over is not a threat, it's our only hope /s

[chewz]

> optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

You are confusing narrative, a positive spin with actual rules of the system. In political system they are never the same.

Freedom, equal opportunity etc are not objectives of our political system, they are just the narrative.

[verisimi]

I don't think those at the top of the social hierarchy would condone the 'better system'.

[alexashka]

We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.

For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.

The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)

[xyzzy_plugh]

> We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job.

Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.

Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.

I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.

I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?

[alexashka]

The kinds of jobs I imagine would leave people with far more energy and time to do whatever they want - including learning, or not learning :)

[Terr_]

> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.

There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:

> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]

> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]

> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs

[neilv]

> > that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them.

They're right... when the other is someone like them.

And they have a blind spot for an other who is not like them.

Meanwhile, what is the blind spot of the people who are not like that (i.e., who believe in equality)?

Is their blind spot that they can't imagine so many people who are trying to gain advantage, and being deceitful about it?

[cjfd]

This analysis is highly muddled. "making things equal" != democracy. Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies. The concepts of democracy and capitalism have a far greater reach than the current US political climate where both are malfunctioning. The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country and corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.

[TFYS]

There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.

[lurk2]

The basic mechanism you’re describing is essentially accurate, however:

> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.

This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.

[TFYS]

I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.

[lurk2]

I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Attempts to engineer perfect political systems that are immune to this sort of infiltration is like trying to build a structure that will never need to be repaired—you can expend a lot of resources and effort on it upfront, but on a long enough timeline there will be failure modes you didn’t foresee.

[immibis]

In other words, cancer always spreads.

Not necessarily the first cancer, but eventually one will.

Cancer is when a component of a system acts to replicate or enrich itself instead of acting to perpetuate the system.

[sethammons]

What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something.

Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing?

Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair?

If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinces enough people that for very large values of 2, the answer is five, democracy says the answer is 5. How do you protect against this outcome in a pure democracy?

[TFYS]

Education would probably be the answer. In a true democracy we would need to make sure everyone is well educated. Of course there are a lot of decisions that require very specialized knowledge that can't be taught to everyone, and in such cases it might be necessary to have limited participation or some kind of weighted voting.

[pqtyw]

Unfortunately that seems to be highly subjective and different people have a very different understanding of what "well educated" means.

[pqtyw]

> What if some people should have more or less say in something.

Yes, I certainly agree.

The problem (which IMHO outweighs all the benefits by quite a bit) is that when you allow drawing these artificial lines the ones in charge of them will inevitably design the system in such a way that benefits them (maybe even without ill intentions).

It's similar to geographical gerrymandering just openly based on social/education/etc. class.

Also... balancing interests of diverse social and economic groups is not exactly straightforward, its certainly not basic math.

[esafak]

You instill civic virtue from a young age.

[pqtyw]

That's how totalitarian regimes maintain their grip on power as well. At the end of the day someone needs to define what "civic virtue" is, if its done top down well that might not necessarily work out that well (of course it might be the opposite but it seems like a very dangerous method).

[DeathArrow]

Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal". In a democracy, the people have the power to decide and anyone has the power to elect, be elected and to voice his opinion freely.

[lurk2]

> Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal".

His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.

[corimaith]

What you call influence is simply trust that others impart to an individual. There is very little a single individual can physically do by themselves. So if there is someone with the influence to challenge a militia then it's better to say a proportionate number of people are also challenging the militia with the person as their proxy.

[TFYS]

If things are not equal, then the voice of some people is louder than the voice of others, and that is no longer a true democracy.

[lanfeust6]

Nothing has been as effective at dispersing and diffusing power than Liberal democracy.

[FirmwareBurner]

>There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible.

Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone.

But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor.

People will never end up equal no matter how many thumbs the government puts on the scale, that actually makes it so much worse.

[TFYS]

Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.

All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.

[FirmwareBurner]

Can you go into detail how your ideal system would work?

[cjfd]

This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?

[mejutoco]

Democracy is about equality of rights, not equality. People are not equal in every aspect, but they should be equal in front of the law, for example.

Freedom is not absolute because your freedom stops where somebodys freedom beginns.

Hence, if you practice medicine without qualifications there is a high chance you will hurt somebody. It is not undemocratic to protect against hurting others. Hurting others is not a right.

Interesting thought exercise though.

[lurk2]

> Is this incompatible with democracy?

Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.

[TFYS]

Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.

[cjfd]

One can argue whether 20 times more is too much or too little but I would say that it is correct that a doctor gets paid quite a bit more than unskilled labor. Some people who become doctors might still go through with it if it were not but most (sane) people would not go through the lengthy and very demanding path that is medical school and residency if it was not a better paid than a job that very many people could do. I can tell you here and now that I don't think I personally would have had the stamina to become a medical doctor.

[thrance]

> Capitalism can both create and break hierarchies.

No, Capitalism can only reinforce hierarchies. Its core tenet is accumulation of capital, and thus power.

> corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.

Corruption is what happens when the capitalist class gets powerful enough to bend the rules. Incompetence is what happens when they figure out they can put a puppet in place and order him to bend the rules faster for them.

[throawaywpg]

There used to be a name for this. "Everyone is different." How people have forgotten this basic fact is beyond me.

[DeathArrow]

>that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them

That's true even in the most leftist and forcefully egalitarian regimes like communism. There are a few taking the ultimate decisions and there are some that benefit.

[bongodongobob]

Our current regime lies through their teeth daily. Like obvious, completely made up lies. Every. Day. It's not a misunderstanding. One side is pushing for authoritarianism, one is not. One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. I'm so fuckin tired of pretending there is just some kind of misunderstanding between both "sides".

[idle_zealot]

No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.

[vintermann]

But people do not value hierarchy for its own sake. They value hierarchy when they're on top of it, or at least in the top half. There are not actually fundamentally different values, but different interests.

[Terr_]

It's a mistake to assume that it's just about advantage or greed.

People even relatively far down may believe The Hierarchy offers predictability and stability—even if I think their belief is incorrect.

Authoritarians tend to be fearful, and it offers a partial answer to those fears.

[DeathArrow]

>One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence.

Violence like shooting political opponents for voicing their opinions?

[immibis]

Proof by counterexample: I think it would have been a good decision to shoot Adolf Hitler for his opinions, don't you?

[esafak]

Simpler example: WWII happened, causing more than Hitler to be killed. Wars are political acts.

[immibis]

Sure would have been good if someone had killed Hitler before he started the war.

[leobg]

BF Skinner had the same idea. You can read it in his book, Walden Two.

[Aerroon]

I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.

[DeathArrow]

>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.