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non_radical_centrist


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What do people really mean when they talk about “left” and “right” politics?


The terms “right” and “left emerged from when in the French revolution, the group that sat on the right side of the Constituent Assembly were aligned with religion and the king, and the group that sat on the left side was aligned with democracy and secularization. The left-right spectrum has since endured, despite how often many of the parties we call “far right” have nothing to do with monarchism, and many of the parties we call “far left” are authoritarian and anti-democratic themselves. Many people have tried to create consistent frameworks to explain why party A is on the left and party B is on the right, but none that I have seen have actually consistently worked. Some people have tried to rectify the errors by adding more dimensions- such as “horseshoe theory” adding a vertical dimension so that the far left and far right loop back to being similar, the political compass that has an authoritarian axis which which separates right-libertarians from right-authoritarians and same with the left, or even the 8-Axis compass which like the name suggests has 8 different dimensions. In Part 1 of this comment I will explain my theory, and in Part 2 I will point out the many failure points of alternate theories.


Part 1


I think none of those theories really properly explain the left-right spectrum, and they all have flaws at capturing what the common person means when they talk about left-right. When trying to determine rules that capture the popular conception of the left-right spectrum, your definition should align with how it’s actually used. If your definition tries to say the Nazis are far left, or that the Democrats are center-right, it automatically fails as a definition of the popular conception. If you have to say, “Uh, akshually, Party X falls here on the spectrum”, then you are automatically wrong, because the popular conception is the ultimate arbiter of truth, not your definition. Your definition is just a map that is trying to capture the territory. Maybe your definition could still be useful as some other type of political spectrum model that identifies some parties as authoritarian vs libertarian, or good vs evil, or whatever, but it doesn’t work for capturing them as left vs right as popularly conceived.


How I think the left-right spectrum works is that it captures which parties are willing to cooperate with each other. For example, say we have this spectrum of parties elected to a parliament: Communists(far left), democratic socialists(left), liberals(center-left), conservatives(center-right), nationalists(right), fascists(far-right). A pretty standard spread going from the far left to far right. But why are the fascists far right while the communists are far left? Both groups have many similarities- they both want to abolish elections, both want to nationalize many or all industries under government control, both want to repress free speech. My thesis is that they make up opposite ends because they are the last parties that would be willing to positively cooperate in the parliament. On any bill that parliament passed, if the fascists and communists both vote yes, I guarantee that every party between them will also have voted yes. The far left and far right may have similarities, but you’ll never actually see them vote together on a bill like “Introduce new corporate taxes to fund the military” unless every party between them also voted yes. Maybe there will be some bill that the entire parliament from far left to far right cooperates on like a bill banning murdering puppies, meaning both the far left and far right vote yes together on it, but always all the more moderate parties will be voting yes too. But that rule only applies to positive cooperation- they might negatively cooperate against a bill from the centrist parties. For example, perhaps all the centrist parties want to pass a bill that will enable the nation to take out a large loan from the World Bank- but both the communists and fascists don’t like that sort of international debt to foreigners, and both vote against the bill. That sort of negative cooperation that is characterized by preventing action is allowed, and is even common, according to my theory.


This does not just apply to the farthest left and farthest right- it applies to every party in the parliament. The liberals and the communists will not cooperate positively on something unless the democratic socialists also cooperate positively. The liberals and democratic socialists cooperating positively does not guarantee the communists will also cooperate positively- it just enables it as a possibility. My theory is not about distance between parties either- for example, it’s not impossible in my theory for there to be a communist, socialist, liberal, conservative coalition, despite the conservatives being far closer to the nationalists and even the fascists than they are to the communists.


In more formal logic, you can express it as, If two parties vote yes together on a motion, Then every party between the two parties on the left-right spectrum will also vote yes on the motion. It can also be worded as “All parties that vote together on a motion form a continuous line of neighbors on the political spectrum”. In the real world, it’s useful to call a party “far left” or “center right” or what have you in order to describe which other parties they’re most likely to cooperate with. And whether a party is left or right is entirely relative- in the early 1800s Prussia, someone calling for a constitutional monarchy might be a radical leftist, but today would be a radical rightists, for example. Also, you can fairly easily predict which parties someone will be more willing to cooperate with even before they're elected- that lets you call a candidate who has never actually been elected far right or far left, by imagining who they'll be more likely to vote with.


Now, I was a bit extreme in my language above- you can probably find some examples of the right and left cooperating without centrists. Whenever I said guarantee, it was an exaggeration. Political science doesn’t have “hard” laws like how physics does after all. But examples of the left and right positively cooperating without centrists also cooperating are extremely rare, far more rare than you’d expect given how some parties on both extremes have seemingly very similar policies. For example, left libertarians and right libertarians both hate police, or nationalists and socialists both want the government to control economic industry. Yet you will not see such parties cooperating to pass bills on those topics at the same time as centrist parties vote against those policies. And on the other side, parties that you might think have relatively little in common like libertarians and conservatives often manage to find a lot of common ground to cooperate on. Also, this only applies to domestic politics. It can have some influence on geopolitics- I think governments generally prefer cooperating with other governments who are on a similar place to them on the political spectrum. But it’s not a requirement for cooperation like how it is domestically. As one example, the far left Soviets and far right Nazis cooperated to partition the relatively centrist Poland between them.


The phrase “It’s impossible to prove a negative” is untrue, it is often possible to prove negatives. But, sometimes it can be extremely hard to prove negatives. To prove that more extreme parties don’t positively cooperate with more moderate parties, I’d have to dig through all the records of voting history and just empirically show it doesn’t happen. I don’t have tools to do that and don’t particularly care to, but I invite everyone to present counter-examples- they probably exist, but I expect they’ll be generally quite rare. The closest I found was in 2015 the Greek far left and far right cooperating against the EU who wanted Greece to repay its debt, but even that from what I read looked more like negative cooperation where they just together refused to cooperate with the EU as opposed to work together to accomplish new things.


Part 2- Other theories


This section is less important but I want to elaborate on how I disagree with other positions.


I’ll start with Mathew Yglesias’ recent theory of Left vs Right, as it was partial inspiration for this post. I thought his post was great with an accurate summary of relevant history, but fails at making a consistent set of rules with which to define left vs right. He defines the right as being fundamentally pro-hierarchy and the left as fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and walks through a few issues he thinks proves his point, such as religion, racism, and policing. I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think he’s grasping towards a pattern that does exist, but that pattern doesn’t explain left vs right. For example, it doesn’t explain libertarians, who tend to be Republican but are fiercely anti-police. Or how leftists want a strong(hierarchical) government that will control speech to ban hatred. The hierarchy theory of left vs right fails to explain how the terms are used in the real world.


Next, horse shoe theory. This theory states that along the extremes, the parties become more similar to each other, becoming increasingly authoritarian. Again, it doesn’t adequately explain libertarians, such as Milei in Argentina. He’s in many ways extreme and farther right than most politicians, but he’s farther right in a economic way, where he supports liberalization of markets, not in a way where he wants to consolidate all government power in his personal hands. He’s not far right in the sense that he’s a nationalist he promotes chauvinistic Argentinian superiority either- in fact he’s talked about how he’s considered converting to Judaism and has a lot of respect for Israel, something very different from the anti-Jewish stance many others on the far right take. Horseshoe theory fails to explain to explain how the terms are used in the real world.


The Political Compass. Probably the best known way to plot parties relative to each other after the standard linear model and horseshoe theory. It was original created by leftists and was extremely badly calibrated to try to trick people into thinking they were on the left- placing Obama in authoritarian right but if you actually put Obama’s positions into the compass you’re placed solidly libertarian left, for example. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden is even more far right and even more authoritarian, further demonstrating their bias since by their measures Biden would almost certainly be farther left than Obama. But, ignoring its creators bias, could the actual model be useful if you just recalibrated it? Maybe for some purposes, but not as an objectively accurate model for placing parties. It misses too many axis. What’s more economically left, a Republican party that wants to enact higher tariffs or a Democrat party that wants to enact higher corporate taxes? Is a government that’s a dictatorship but operates with a very light hand more or less authoritarian than an extremely democratic government that controls everything its people does? Do ISIS, the Nazis, and Bismarck really all belong together in a similar space despite their obvious extreme differences?


The 8 Axis test. Similar issues to the political compass, although it’s a bit more fine tuned, at the expense of being more unwieldy. It still doesn’t solve where a party really falls if it falls at opposite extremes within the same axis- e.g an autocratic government that doesn’t get involved in people’s personal lives, or a Georgist government that wants an extreme 100% land value tax, but that’s the only tax. You would have to add even more axis to address every nuance, but then it becomes even more unwieldy, and it becomes entirely divorced from what people actually mean when they say “right” or “left”.


My theory solely describes parties as well. I think ideologies are something separate. Ideologies have a lot of connections to parties, but I think cannot be actually properly mapped to the left or right. For one, as I said earlier, the degree of left-right depends on context- an ideologies position in early 1800s Prussia is completely different than the same ideology’s position today. When people try to extend the left-right spectrum out of domestic politics, they usually do it by kind of guessing at “If that ideology/foreign party did have a member elected to my legislature, which domestic party would they be most closely aligned with?”, but that method breaks down in manner ways. Also, where a party falls on a left-right spectrum in many ways in practice is determined by the personal relationships of party members to the members of the other parties, and the sorts of aesthetics the party likes to use. For example, do they invoke protecting the working class or do they invoke protecting Christianity to justify shutting down immigration- the same policy, with merely different aesthetics, can put them at opposite ends of the left-right.


To measure how likely parties are to cooperate in absolute terms, not just relative terms, you need a different model than mine. I think Nate Silver’s triangle model of Socialism, Conservatism, and Leftism has a good ratio of simplicity to explanatory power. I think to be more accurate too, you could change it to a triangle where the corners are wanting Equality of Opportunity(liberalism), Equality of Outcome(socialism), and openly desiring Hierarchy(conservatism). But that’s getting into an entirely different discussion that I’m much less confident on than my core theory.


Do You think I’m Wrong? Prove it with one easy test!


Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it. You do not need many examples at all- obviously by any theory they should have little in common. But most theories do posit they do have a little common and therefore should cooperate a little- I assert they do not cooperate at all on positive actions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Good luck!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
https://youtube.com/watch?v=C9IFPgcRk8M


Fig trees are pretty crazy


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Buy some earbuds and listen to some audibooks while I'm rolling? That hardly sounds like a bad way to spend my time if I'm getting paid


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Did any of your peers regard any teachers fondly at the time? No one was going, "Oh, it's too bad you got Mrs. Alice for math, she can't teach! I'm lucky I got Mr. Bob, he's hilarious and makes the subject make sense"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Our 4 year old wants to do everything we do, which consist of exercise, woodworking, gardening, cooking, cleaning, yardwork and reading. She's already begging me to teach her how to program, which is obviously a ways off, but the wife is teaching her to read.




There are tons of drag-and-drop educational programming apps that teach stuff like loops and functions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think children hold the good teachers in high regard. Most teachers aren't good. I think if we broke teachers unions and empowered school choice, we could quickly see a great deal of very good teachers teaching. Everyone loves a good teacher in the right circumstances, from students to parents to administrators to the good teacher themselves because it's such a fulfilling job. But in public schools where the principals receive the same salary regardless of performance, and powerful unions dedicated to preserving jobs over teaching children, good teachers are secondary to minimally risky teachers who don't get the school bad press.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I could see Poland getting close if they had ideal policies and conditions and pulled of something similar to the east Asian tigers. I doubt they would but I'd give it maybe a 1% chance. Especially since they, and their neighbors the Baltics, appear to have had some pretty good economic policies post-communism and are growing pretty fast.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think that's normally how American law is applied, but admittedly I don't know much about it. But where most people seem to blame an anti-Trump conspiracy, I blame him for losing his case. He intimidated witnesses on social media, so the judge gave him a gag order, then he violated the gag order repeatedly. He didn't stand for the jury like the rest of the court. He's been terrible to many previous lawyers so he was pulling from the bottom of the barrel for his defense.


I think Trump deserved to be proclaimed Not Guilty. But the adversarial legal system is designed around the defendant actually putting a half decent effort into defending themselves. I can sympathize with all the poor folk out there who don't understand what the legal system expects them to do and get screwed on that front, but I have no sympathy for a billionaire. If Trump wasn't a narcissist, I think he could've won the trial.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 2, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's a great deal of productive work people can do with very little abstract thinking skill. I went through basic training recently. I was probably the smartest, or at least close to it, at stuff like algebra and writing essays and reading comprehension. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people there would have trouble with those sorts of problems and would need to go through a couple hours of lessons to consistently get those problems correct, and even then would probably forget those lessons after a few months.


But that didn't matter at all. In boot camp, the things that mattered were how well you polished boots, folded clothes, made it to the place you were supposed to be on time, could do the multi-step safety check on your rifle, could put together a lean-to to sleep under, and all the fitness stuff. Almost all those people with lower IQs could blow me out of the water at those tasks(although there were a couple people that I expect would be especially bad at math and were even worse than me at basic skills). For regular life skills, stuff that wasn't abstract, they could do great- they weren't some barely conscious apes that barely managed not to kill themselves, like I feel like we'd both expect after hearing they couldn't answer 100-17 with mental math.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think you're making good and accurate points and it's a shame you're getting downvoted. But there's one point I disagree on.




The unlawful means in question were Cohen making a payment to Stormy Daniels in order to conceal her story from the public in order to prevent it from damaging Trump's election chances.




I don't think this should actually be considered a crime. As I understand it, Cohen pled guilty to it. I think that was part of a plea deal and he just took it because the way plea deals work is that he wouldn't actually receive a better outcome by trying to insist that one, but only one, of the things he was being charged with was false.


But looking at the actual law, the idea that concealing information which could damage Trump's campaign is a campaign contribution is silly. If you're that loose with the standards, practically anything would be a campaign contribution.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Say what you like about what the CCP did to Hong Kong (and believe me, I do), but it demonstrated their ability and patience to execute a multi-decade plan.




I don't think it was particularly likely to be a multi-decade plan secretly passed down. I think decades ago Chinese leadership wanted at least partial control of Hong Kong as a matter of national pride, but didn't think they could get away with total control. And then more recently they felt they could get away with total control, so they went ahead and enforced more control.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But what do you think he actually did?




He was a settler, did hate speech, supported a far right terrorist group. If those aren't enough for you or you want specifics I can get them but you seem to agree that he's a criminal scumbag.




I’m not passing judgement on it, I mean that the way it’s portrayed by some outlets is ridiculous and over-hyped.




It's over hyped in that it isn't literally the worst thing ever, but it's still pretty terrible and Trump is going to trial over it, and it's a major factor in why I think Trump is literally one of the worst major Republicans ever. Similarly, I think the stuff Ben Gvir did was terrible and he has gone to trial and I don't know many Israeli politicians but he sounds like he's one of the worst. In my ideal world both Trump and Ben Gvir would have no public support, and instead more centrist leaders like Romney and Benny Gantz would have popular support.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


LOL. Shortening Ben Gvir to ‘Gvir’ is like shortening ‘McDonald’ to ‘Donald’. You’re betraying a ridiculous lack of familiarity.




Yeah I'm not that familiar. If you want to provide a good defense of why his actions are acceptable instead of just criticzing my familiarity, go ahead.




The analogous act would be that republicans tried to overthrow American democracy on January 6th, and that your former president told you to grab women by the pussy.




Those were pretty bad too. Better or worse than Ben Gvir's? I'm not sure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It lines up with what I've read about the Israeli far right too. MAGA supporters aren't literally like, settling parts of black communities or Mexico to create their own little villages and occassionally killing black people or Mexicans in the process. That's what the Israeli settlement movement is. Ben Gvir, one of the actual most important politicians in Israel and not just a fringe lunatic, is a settler himself. He has faced criminal charges from Israel over hate speech. He was convicted of supporting Kach, which Israel itself classifies a terrorist group. It's not just Gvir, there are other far right politicians like Smotrich too.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezalel_Smotrich


Claiming that all Israelis support them, or that 50% of Israelis support them, would be wrong I think. Claiming 10% of Israelis support them, I think is accurate.


Maybe you think the Palestinians are all barbarous demons and that the Israeli far right is justified. But the descriptive parts of the NYT article would still be accurate about describing the far right's actions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
https://manifold.markets/news/chinataiwan


More markets where people put their (play) money where their mouth is with regards to their predictions, and I encourage everyone with strong opinions to do the same.


Personally I think the only factor that really matters is the mind of Xi Jinping. China will not invade Taiwan without his approval, and they'd likely immediately invade if he decided he did want to. Any weighing of the costs and benefits for China only matter to the extent that Xi Jinping actually cares about China instead of just his own personal benefit.


I expect Xi has many sycophants around him telling him that China is increasingly ascendant and that the US is on a downward spiral and that the Taiwanese masses actually want to be unified under a glorious greater China. That's a standard situation for a great many dictators.


On the other hand, Xi probably isn't totally isolated from reality. There are some major issues even the biggest information bubble I doubt could hide from him. He can see that the Ukraine war, while it's debatable just how well Russia is doing, definitely wasn't the 1 month stomp campaign many expected. He can see that the Chinese economy has had some major setbacks with their housing market having a crisis and Evergrande collapsing.


The benefits to invading Taiwan are basically two: To appeal to the nationalistic ego of the masses, and to inflate his own personal ego, with military conquest. My understanding is that the Chinese masses do have nationalist egos and like being the big scary country on the block, as do most masses(until they get into a brutal war for no real benefit like WW1, WW2, Vietnam, Iraq 2, and get reminded painfully of the downsides. But I don't think they're extremely jingoistic, they're not Germans in 1938 or Americans in 2002.


As for Xi's internal psyche and how eager he personally is for war, it's very hard to know. China generally hasn't been that militant in recent years. Their last major conflict was the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, long before Xi. They're had some grandstanding around the South China Sea, and some skirmishes with India. Maybe he is more on the pacifist side and doesn't want conflict with no tangible benefit. Maybe he's just biding his time until he has the largest possible advantage over the USA to strike. Maybe he personally isn't that into war, but wouldn't back down or disavow an overeager admiral who escalates tensions during a patrol around Taiwan and that leads into war.


In conclusion, I really don't know. I just feel like focusing on what benefits China is a mistake, the focus should be on what Xi is thinking.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 31, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sometimes you need to slow roll people into your shocking conclusion not to turn them away immeadiately. Often books need to really stretch out the distance to their conclusion to get people to actually read them. But in general I agree. I find it especially annoying when books and long articles don't actually even clearly state their conclusions anywhere, let alone in the preface!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I recognize. A willingness of the larger state to keep petri dishes going for a while is necessary.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Biden can't pardon Trump for state crimes. He could pardon Trump for the federal crimes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Goodhart's law. You're only optimizing for the ability to game a prediction market, not the ability to be a wise ruler.




I think it's harder to game a prediction market than to game any other method of selecting wise rulers.




Why not?




I believe that if a competent absolute ruler implemented my proposed system, like Napoleon at his height did so instead of invading Russia, governmental and economic systems like socialism, communism, fascism, and liberterianism could've been tested without the genocide. And that'd have been a much better outcome for humanity as a whole. Today, I'd prefer if we could set up lots of charter cities that implement different ideologies, each mostly free from state influence, to see which methods are most succesful.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What determines the nation's values considering your hypothetical?




Through some sort of democratic process.




Since such values might need to be established and maybe through time a system with condemned values, might perform better.




If ultimately a super majority of the population decides they really like slavery or genocide, I don't think really any system has a good defense against that. I'm kind of relying on slavery and genocide actually being bad ideas, so a system that rewards good ideas won't have anyone do those things.




And how do you stop areas which have similar ideologies from ganging up on groups they are ideologically opposed to?




It does take buy in from people and leaders. That's why I proposed the hypothetical of a good spirited monarch who wants to do better, and this being the solution I think the good hearted monarch should arrive at. In a scenario more resembling real life, I don't think any real world executive actually has the power to implement such experiments without also getting the masses and other elites to buy in. Ultimately people have to be willing to prove the success of their ideology through creating good conditions on the ground instead of conquering their neighbors, which is a limitation, but I don't think there's a way around that. But I don't think this is a fatal flaw; it's decently rare in developed countries at least for one province to try to impose their ideology on another province by force.


In real life, I'd really just first try to encourage prediction markets more. For every important decision the government makes, such as passing bills or spending 300 million on building an aid pier for Palestine, I'd want there to be a few prediction markets trying to measure whether it's a good idea. My hypothetical was more prompted by thinking about what I'd want to do in a time like 1920, when there were many ideologies and little evidence of what I'd actually do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Perhaps. But I don't think so.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well sure, but some systems make more mistakes than others. A prediction market as I view it is ultimately just a systematic way to keep track of who makes errors the most and who makes them the least, so you can put the people who make them the least into power.


Calling something like the USSR or Nazi Germany just a regular human mistake isn't an acceptable conclusion to me. I want a systemized method of how we can go about designing better governance and economic systems, since I don't think anyone's completely happy with any systems anywhere, without risking making a USSR.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Just being smart and virtuous isn't enough to prevent being taken in by honest mistakes, and when you have absolute power an honest mistake can be very devastating.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Any institution where the leaders get too selfish will naturally lose power from its people just leaving, that's part of why freedom of movement is so necessary. And hopefully the prediction markets can more clearly evaluate who's actually done a good job, such that people trying to uphold a flawed institution will have little credibility.