[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?

[TFYS]

I don't have details. It'd need to be based on direct democracy, but for now we don't have any way to make good decisions efficiently with it. I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

[FirmwareBurner]

>I don't have details.

No way. I'm shocked.

>Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes.

And how is 'equal outcomes for everyone' as the end goal, different than communism?

Even if you think it's not communism, the results will still be the same: poverty and famine for everyone but the elites since, news flash for you, people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures just like our ape ancestors, and if you force equality of outcome upon them, you take away their opportunity to try to better themselves in respect to their peers, so then society spirals downward into everyone refusing to work or at most doing the bare minimum since there's no incentive do work harder if you'll end up equal to Bob the uneducated alcoholic.

>Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.

Yes the lottery of birth in life is unfair, welcome to the real world. Some people are born rich some are born poor, some are born tall some are bone short, some are born pretty some are born ugly, some are born smart some are born stupid, some are diligent and hard working, some are lazy and procrastinative.

You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels. The only thing you can do is tax inherited wealth better, and try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.

>I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

Yeah, no. It's gonna be the exact opposite of that: more surveillance, more targeted propaganda, and less democracy. See Palantir.

[TFYS]

> No way. I'm shocked.

Please don't do this. Criticizing and thinking about the outlines of new solutions is a necessary first step. Details can be figured out after people agree on what the problems with the current systems are. Obviously I'm aware of the problems of previously attempted systems and don't wish to repeat them. If we can't figure out better details than those tried before, then of course I would prefer the current system.

> people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures

Sure, humans have many kinds of needs and wants, and climbing the social hierarchy is just one of them. Why should we base our governance and our economic system on that need instead of something less destructive? There can still be hierarchies, just not the kind of hierarchies that give people power over others. An olympic gold medalist is at the top of a hierarchy, but doesn't have much power to control other people. Hierarchies like that could still remain to satisfy the people who have a strong need for such a thing.

Also, as I've said in other comments, I do believe there might be a need for some level of differences in rewards, as not all jobs are such that enough people would want to do them purely from intrinsic motivation. In such cases there should first be attempts to find rewards that don't provide control over other people, and if that is not enough, then we should figure out if the job is absolutely necessary and increase the rewards little by little until we have enough people doing it. Not all power differential can or should be avoided, but creating them should be the last resort and they should be as small as possible.

> You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels.

Maybe not entirely, but we could do much much better than what is happening now. It's important that we have a system where people are encouraged to use their abilities to improve society, but the huge differences in the resources people get is surely not the only way to achieve that. A lot of scientists do science not because the pay is great, but because they're interested in the topic and there's fame and knowledge to be had. Also the rewards that people expect are relative. In a society where someone gets paid 300 times more than others the most skilled people won't want to do the work for less than that, but in a society where the highest reward is 5 times more than others the most skilled people would still gravitate towards that work. Maybe personal interests would have a larger part in deciding what a person chooses to work on, but I don't think that would be a bad thing.

> try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.

But this will eventually lead to the winners taking more and more, we end up with a system similar to what the soviet union was and we will crash. The direction we are heading in is plainly visible. The capitalist system is better than the soviet one, as it's slower to centralize power, but eventually the power differentials and resulting corruption will be large enough that the system no longer functions, and we are very close to it I think.

We can continue this way and crash and reset every few hundred years, or we can acknowledge that it is the centralization of power that causes these issues and try to build a system that avoids it as much as possible.