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It's so wild to believe humanity held such a hopeful political mythos, ever. And I see such appeal here. To make efficient, to make a government that functions

It's so wild to believe humanity held such a hopeful political mythos, ever. And I see such appeal here. To make efficient, to make a government that functions that builds that runs well. Mechanistic sympathy is a key term that sends the engineers heart aflutter; to work together holds great delight. The idea that there might be some shots for mankind at engineering not just a social, as the article highlights, but government itself has some real appeal, one that today seems doomed by mutual "it will will never work" / "it will never happen" anti-willpower. Reciprocally through, I think many alas agree broadly (beyond Africa) with this the dark assessment of the political offered by Captain Ibrahim Traoré who today announced an end of Democracy, seemingly appointed himself dictator of Burka Faso: > "The truth is, politics in Africa – or at least what we've experienced in Burkina - is that a real politician is someone who embodies every vice: a liar, a sycophant, a smooth-talker." https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly0zp1xgz3o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly0zp1xgz3o I do wish there were a stronger engineering to politics pipeline. Politics being such a money and campaigning game, a game of mass appeal, really ruins so much. Thats both a problem with the electorate, but also a problem with how we've let democracy evolve, how mass media and the courts and our systems themselves have iterated over the years. It would just be so nice to think we could take our living documents, our systems, & spirit them forward to respond to all that become, and hopefully redeem our collaborative search for a better more orderly well functioning state & world. Maybe we should all fly that Vermillion & Chromium monad flag (the technocracy's flag), at least a bit, in our hearts! (The Technocracy are also a fantastic somewhat unrelated quasi villain in the White Wolf game Mage, engineers of all manners including social working to end the undue influence of the supernatural on the world, defending and sometimes tyrannizing mankind with science. It's a lovely connection to know both Technocracies bit!) There's a steady trickle of pretty good technocracy stories, btw. Some good reads, including Marageret Mead, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=technocracy https://hn.algolia.com/?query=technocracy

justonceokay 7mo ago
Having met the people that run engineering firms, I’m not sure I want them anywhere near my government either. I’ll take my politicians inept over ruthlessly efficient, any day
- wnoise 7mo ago
  You don't want the people that run the engineering firms, no. You might want some of the people that work there.
_bypa 7mo ago
Why optimize for efficiency though? Why not human flourishing or planetary health, whichever way you wish to define that? Efficiency sounds to me like an absolutely awful way to run any society as it's what turns individuals into disposable cogs of a machine that needs to be operated smoothly because, well, no obvious reason other than a fetish to see the machine run smoothly, no matter the human cost.
- akomtu 7mo ago
  Technocracy, and the doctrine of materialism, sees humans as machines.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - _bypa 7mo ago
    Or perhaps not even that. We're just fuel for the machines.
  - jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
    I'd characterize it as cybernetic, as observant to & attending to inputs and outputs of systems. And interested in improving the results, by observing how these systems function. Your characterization feels like one of those seeing-only-evil's that I characterize as an anti-willpower.
- pfdietz 7mo ago
  Efficiency was important in an environment where different civilizations were engaged in what amounts to a death struggle. Do we forget what won WW2?
- jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
  I agree it's not perfect, but I think you are over-dramatizing. My gut says that planetary healthy would be wildly improved if we worked to build a more efficient society. Having meaning & caring about being a well running world would hopefully give us some grounds to flourish on, pride and effort and will to drive us towards something meaningful, beyond the grab-as-much-money-as-you-can state of things today. A collective future worth caring about. The article talks about building a social world for people deliberately. It seems like they had some care, wanted to try to improve the social lives of people too. If anything I think the Technocracy people understood somewhat better that these decisions about how we treat people are not instanteous questions: maybe we get more social productivity out of some by treating them like crap & working them to collapse, but then we have decades of them being a social and perhaps economic drain on all society. That short term exploitation is what capital does to people today already! But no scientist worth a salt is going to create such imbalanced wasteful systems! Efficiency can mean a lot of different things. It depends on what you are trying to make efficient, doesn't it? An efficient society, in my view, would be focused on happiness indexes, on gini coefficients. It would be trying to make our footprint more modest, try to make goods repairiable & sustainable long term. Modern eco-concern today has a lot of overlap with many of the basics here. I'm speculating a lot. But if you don't want to nibble at this food for thought what other morsels are worth trying? This very much is a case where, again, I find the anti-willpower striking and concerning, the leaping into the negative. Over something strange and weird and a bit fanciful and naive. But at least they were working for something to believe in. At least they had a will to better, one that seems fundamentally resoundingly kind of true, kind of needed: a view that is long term, that focuses on building a maintainable long term running order, that doesn't consume until exhaustion.
junofan 7mo ago
I dunno, Common Sense puts forth the idea that government exists to occupy the space where men are evil. It grows and shrinks accordingly. A larger role for government implies more evil, not less.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
  Paine also said that society is good. That government is but the necessary to maintain it as it grows. And I worry that what government we have now is not very effective. Health care in the US is a mess. Building anything has grown vastly more expensive, be it buildings, rail, or ships. We have countless laws protecting corporate IP, lobbyists a gazillion, and corporations regularly court shop to get whatever judicial treatment they desire. The idea of a government focused on efficiency, that is trying to share and spread intelligence & knowledge & know how, that tried to help make us efficient at housing and food and health care: that feels, well, sort of essential at this point to maintaining what Paine loved & cherished: society. And giving a nation back some purpose, some meaning: that can help bring us together too, perhaps. A purpose make a world that won't over consume, that has a chance to house & feed & care for itself, for hundreds, thousands, or vastly more years: that feels like such a potential antidote to the poison of reckless abandon & foolery that so many brutal nasty little value-less children have beset upon the world, have dissoluted our empathy & perpetrated mercenary anti-social campaigns against the world with. We need value systems that look forward, that care broadly, and that place a reasoned, scientific view as a pole star, and that seek actions not grandiose for grandiosity sake, but to serve us all, to bring an efficient, livable, social societal world out. Our scale is perhaps a bit bigger than what Paine could have imagined, our numbers vastly more. I fear the Bowling Alone future only intensifies. I would not throw out Paine, but I do think we ought be open to asking what values our society shows for itself, asking if the values have kept up & are adequate, and we ought be open to assessing how governments might better enable societal values we think we need or perhaps just want to see. Technocracy's suggestion that those who care deeply about how the world works, and already have a life of servant leadership, seems atuned, to me, of being ideal for maintaining a society of fewer ills, and being willing to reduce their own role as we do get more efficient, as our ills and evils receed. While inspiring better.

justonceokay 7mo ago

Having met the people that run engineering firms, I’m not sure I want them anywhere near my government either. I’ll take my politicians inept over ruthlessly efficient, any day

wnoise 7mo ago
You don't want the people that run the engineering firms, no. You might want some of the people that work there.

_bypa 7mo ago

Why optimize for efficiency though? Why not human flourishing or planetary health, whichever way you wish to define that? Efficiency sounds to me like an absolutely awful way to run any society as it's what turns individuals into disposable cogs of a machine that needs to be operated smoothly because, well, no obvious reason other than a fetish to see the machine run smoothly, no matter the human cost.

akomtu 7mo ago
Technocracy, and the doctrine of materialism, sees humans as machines.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- _bypa 7mo ago
  Or perhaps not even that. We're just fuel for the machines.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
  I'd characterize it as cybernetic, as observant to & attending to inputs and outputs of systems. And interested in improving the results, by observing how these systems function. Your characterization feels like one of those seeing-only-evil's that I characterize as an anti-willpower.
pfdietz 7mo ago
Efficiency was important in an environment where different civilizations were engaged in what amounts to a death struggle. Do we forget what won WW2?
jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
I agree it's not perfect, but I think you are over-dramatizing. My gut says that planetary healthy would be wildly improved if we worked to build a more efficient society. Having meaning & caring about being a well running world would hopefully give us some grounds to flourish on, pride and effort and will to drive us towards something meaningful, beyond the grab-as-much-money-as-you-can state of things today. A collective future worth caring about. The article talks about building a social world for people deliberately. It seems like they had some care, wanted to try to improve the social lives of people too. If anything I think the Technocracy people understood somewhat better that these decisions about how we treat people are not instanteous questions: maybe we get more social productivity out of some by treating them like crap & working them to collapse, but then we have decades of them being a social and perhaps economic drain on all society. That short term exploitation is what capital does to people today already! But no scientist worth a salt is going to create such imbalanced wasteful systems! Efficiency can mean a lot of different things. It depends on what you are trying to make efficient, doesn't it? An efficient society, in my view, would be focused on happiness indexes, on gini coefficients. It would be trying to make our footprint more modest, try to make goods repairiable & sustainable long term. Modern eco-concern today has a lot of overlap with many of the basics here. I'm speculating a lot. But if you don't want to nibble at this food for thought what other morsels are worth trying? This very much is a case where, again, I find the anti-willpower striking and concerning, the leaping into the negative. Over something strange and weird and a bit fanciful and naive. But at least they were working for something to believe in. At least they had a will to better, one that seems fundamentally resoundingly kind of true, kind of needed: a view that is long term, that focuses on building a maintainable long term running order, that doesn't consume until exhaustion.

junofan 7mo ago

I dunno, Common Sense puts forth the idea that government exists to occupy the space where men are evil. It grows and shrinks accordingly. A larger role for government implies more evil, not less.

jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
Paine also said that society is good. That government is but the necessary to maintain it as it grows. And I worry that what government we have now is not very effective. Health care in the US is a mess. Building anything has grown vastly more expensive, be it buildings, rail, or ships. We have countless laws protecting corporate IP, lobbyists a gazillion, and corporations regularly court shop to get whatever judicial treatment they desire. The idea of a government focused on efficiency, that is trying to share and spread intelligence & knowledge & know how, that tried to help make us efficient at housing and food and health care: that feels, well, sort of essential at this point to maintaining what Paine loved & cherished: society. And giving a nation back some purpose, some meaning: that can help bring us together too, perhaps. A purpose make a world that won't over consume, that has a chance to house & feed & care for itself, for hundreds, thousands, or vastly more years: that feels like such a potential antidote to the poison of reckless abandon & foolery that so many brutal nasty little value-less children have beset upon the world, have dissoluted our empathy & perpetrated mercenary anti-social campaigns against the world with. We need value systems that look forward, that care broadly, and that place a reasoned, scientific view as a pole star, and that seek actions not grandiose for grandiosity sake, but to serve us all, to bring an efficient, livable, social societal world out. Our scale is perhaps a bit bigger than what Paine could have imagined, our numbers vastly more. I fear the Bowling Alone future only intensifies. I would not throw out Paine, but I do think we ought be open to asking what values our society shows for itself, asking if the values have kept up & are adequate, and we ought be open to assessing how governments might better enable societal values we think we need or perhaps just want to see. Technocracy's suggestion that those who care deeply about how the world works, and already have a life of servant leadership, seems atuned, to me, of being ideal for maintaining a society of fewer ills, and being willing to reduce their own role as we do get more efficient, as our ills and evils receed. While inspiring better.