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by IanCal 4633 days ago
> Dunning-Kruger effect (which is also used as an argument against democracy)

Democracy isn't about having an efficient system, it's about having a stable system. Democracy is an awful way of getting things done, it's just a reasonably good way of stopping very bad things from happening.

2 comments

Favorite quotation from Kelly Johnson, former head of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works:

> Voting on everything prevents anything very stupid from happening, but also anything very brilliant.

You can guess who called the shots in his aircraft design teams. He did, because he was truly fucking brilliant.

Yes, exactly. It's inefficient, that's the point of it.

He didn't have the same control over things as a dictator would. You can do these things in business more safely because it's less likely to kill large numbers of people.

Yeah, that's the value of a "benevolent dictator" in business. Skunk Works had one, Apple, Python, Ubuntu, and SpaceX too, and all blazed incredible trails in their fields.
I wish more people understood this. People alwayss complain about gridlock, but gridlock is great. It might block progress sometimes but it blocks regresssion just as often. It ensures that changes tend to have wide popular support.