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People least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it. We are forever doomed to be ruled by those worse than us, for the simple reason tha

by N_Lens 18d ago

People least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it. We are forever doomed to be ruled by those worse than us, for the simple reason that reasonable people don't seek power.

phtrivier 18d ago
How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? (And who would decide which Cincinnatus to call for setting up this year's budget ?) Even when people mention "randomly picking up people" ("stochiocracy") I assumed you could refuse :D
- gampleman 18d ago
  Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light. For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc. So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse. Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher). So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.
  - rickydroll 17d ago
    Look at the National Guard model. I'm also thinking that if we made it a regular thing, like the draft, employers could be required to hold the slot open for the person after they've done their tour of duty. However, as I think about this, it would work best at the municipal level, moderately well at the state level, but not at all at the federal level. For the federal level, I think we would need to move to publicly funded campaigns and strong barriers against lobbyists and industry-written legislation.
  - soundnote 17d ago
    Jury duty used to work: As immigration continues apace, it will fail. Lee Kuan Yew had to end jury trials in Singapore because as he notes, in a multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion"
    - phtrivier 17d ago
      Do you have a link to any study about that ? That would probably not happen in Europe, but at least in the US, ethnicities can be studied, so any bias could be visible statistically ?
- jrflowers 18d ago
  We have a system that does that. That’s how we do jury duty. We use sortition to decide important things every day
- Ygg2 18d ago
  That's not how it was usually run, but say in Ancient Athen's the council that decided was whoever was at the council at that time.
- krapp 18d ago
  >How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? A government. All governments are coercive and premised on a few powerful elites maintaining and exercising their power with a monopoly on violence[0]. Yes, even the "good" ones. At the end of the day government, like war, is a racket. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
  - phtrivier 17d ago
    I meant "unwilling people are forced to _exercise_ power". I don't know that it's the case in any representative democracies - people literally _compete_ to access power.
    - krapp 17d ago
      Ok. That would be weird. Presumably if you have power, you have the power to just quit or resign. Given how much effort people put into getting out of jury duty I can only imagine how something like sortition (which I think is what you're describing) would work. Would it be like military conscription, where you could go to prison if you're AWOL? If so, who really has the power in that scenario? And there's also the problem of competence. Forcing some random to act as Secretary of HHS is more likely to get us an RFK type than someone who knows what they're doing. But then vetting candidates with some kind of voir dire like system is just voting, except only a few people get to do it.
      - jjav 17d ago
        These are all problems. On the other hand we know for sure from centuries (millenia?) of evidence that allowing the people who most crave power to be the ones who seek and obtain said power, is a recipe for disaster as well. It is interesting to brainstorm what could be a better system. I think clear qualifications should be required. So to use the HHS example, it would have criteria to be a doctor, certain years of practice, perhaps practice in several specialties for breadth, some research experience, some administrative experience. You'd want to make the criteria narrow enough that only mostly truly qualified people meet it, but also broad enough that at least tens of thousands of people do qualify for the role, so that someone can't just easily fine-tune their resume to assure themselves a spot. It needs to be impossible to game. I don't have the answers, but clearly we can do better than the current system where only power-hungry psychopaths choose to travel the road to obtain the vast power they crave.
noir_lord 18d ago
> To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. (Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) Growing up on a diet of HHGTTG and Discworld just made me intrinsically distrust power in all it's forms.
leobg 18d ago
Sounds like an argument for aristocracy.
- flir 18d ago
  Or a fair die roll.
  - blooalien 17d ago
    > Or a fair die roll. https://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/
- dathinab 18d ago
  against it, it's an argument against aristocracy think about it how do people become aristocrats if not exactly by the mechanisms which make them least suited to rule given the comments argument? Also one very common case of people being drawn to power but not suited for it if people which grew up with disposition that having that power is their "birthright" or similar. Such a disposition means from their POV losing the power, even if its due to them acting incompetent or misusing it, is no different then theft or worse "rebellion" and in turn they tend to be very willing to use a lot of violence and cruelty to keep it. so it's really an argument against any form of government which (in it's most common ways) involves people "sizing" power and tending to at least somewhat pass it forward through generations. And aristocracy in how it normally is practiced definitely falls under that. if anything it's an argument in favor of democracy, just with a lot of added rules against populism, spreading of misinformation, systematically railing up people, qualifications needed to get a position of power etc. anyway if we don't fix modern attention economics being a perfect mechanism to propagate propaganda, misinformation and hate content we will not be getting there and any current attempts to fix this seem fairly limited in effect
api 18d ago
There is a middle ground. This kind of fatalism makes people not want to try. I think we have made political office and running for it so insanely adversarial and toxic that only three kinds of people will dare sign up for it: narcissists, crooks, and ideologues who think they are on a crusade. (The latter includes a variety of religions and ideologies.) Competent sane well balanced people with reasonable balanced views of things like ideologies or for whom religion is more personal and spiritual? No way they’d go near it. People with some of these negative characteristics, like narcissism, but who are also very competent? They can make more money and get often as much prestige in business. So we don’t even get competent narcissists. Why is it so toxic? The media, the process, and us. The media and the people absolutely roast anyone running, and the winner take all process encourages a brutal slug fest. Other countries don’t have it as bad. We could start by asking what they do differently. Not being pure winner take all is one big one. They allow coalitions. That encourages alliances and dialogue. It also limits below the belt attacks since you might have to work hand in hand with these people, so you better not trash them too badly.
roryirvine 18d ago
Many (most?) politicians were traditionally (at least partly) motivated by public service, so we perhaps should consider how to reinvigorate and reinforce that. One possibility might be to specifically improve pathways into politics from sectors that still have high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education. There are likely plenty of other approaches to help balance out the pure power-seekers too, so let's work out what they are and follow as many as possible rather than encouraging fatalism.
- Leonard_of_Q 18d ago
  > high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education. Many of these are mostly known for harbouring activists, not public servants. They serve a cause, not the public and as such are just as unsuitable for politics as the usual suspects.
  - Timon3 17d ago
    Just because many people think they mostly harbor activists, doesn't mean that it's true. I regularly see people getting called "activists" or "ideologues" because they serve the public instead of whatever causes their detractors want to advance.
    - roryirvine 17d ago
      Yes - reflexively denigrating anyone who's not motivated by interests that align with their own as an "activist" is likely one of the reasons why politics has become degraded in the way that it has.
      - Timon3 17d ago
        Yep, same goes for "ideologue" etc. IMO such thought-terminating cliches are a mind virus: ~10-15 years ago I noticed some people frequently using them in discussions. Today, these people are largely incapable of staying calm while listening to any opposing views, no matter the topic! (EDIT: After posting, I had the idea below) My best explanation would be: just like TikTok is harmful to our attention span, thought-terminating cliches are harmful to our tolerance for complexity.
usewik 18d ago
Eh, I prefer to lean on the less dramatic Peter principle.
Ygg2 18d ago
> People least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it. In the current system.* There are systems that allow you to distribute power more equally. It requires a different setup, like for example randomised choice. The people in power don't like it. It's much easier to bribe 2-3 career politicians and guarantee their success.
locallost 18d ago
It makes sense because anyone with experience, ability, and noble goals will give up before they start because it is too difficult. Linus Torvalds said he wouldn't have started Linux if he'd know how difficult it would be (paraphrasing here). So we are left with either people with noble goals, but either no experience or ability, or people with ability and experience, but without noble goals (what we have currently in the US). But let's not despair. We are better off than centuries ago. The consciousness that people are not there to be ruled does not happen over night. Our civilization is just getting started. A republic if you can keep it.
jappgar 18d ago
no it's just a "good times creates weak men" sort of thing. Once you're back to hard times you'll have a whole crop of reasonable people willing to wrestle power at the cost of their lives.
OroPla 18d ago
In many ways, having a king was a lot better than having a bunch of people bickering among themselves without getting stuff done. At least the king was kinda tied to the country and thus the interest of the country was part self-interest.
nisegami 18d ago
The golden path I dream of has ASI replacing human-run governments
- blooalien 17d ago
  > The golden path I dream of has ASI replacing human-run governments Fingers crossed, hoping for a genuinely benevolent ASI Overlord if we somehow find ourselves on that particular timeline (although, there's still a number of ways even that could go horribly awry).
gos9 18d ago
We are forever doomed to beg on our knees to be ruled in general

by N_Lens 18d ago

People least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it. We are forever doomed to be ruled by those worse than us, for the simple reason that reasonable people don't seek power.

phtrivier 18d ago

How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? (And who would decide which Cincinnatus to call for setting up this year's budget ?) Even when people mention "randomly picking up people" ("stochiocracy") I assumed you could refuse :D

gampleman 18d ago
Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light. For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc. So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse. Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher). So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.
- rickydroll 17d ago
  Look at the National Guard model. I'm also thinking that if we made it a regular thing, like the draft, employers could be required to hold the slot open for the person after they've done their tour of duty. However, as I think about this, it would work best at the municipal level, moderately well at the state level, but not at all at the federal level. For the federal level, I think we would need to move to publicly funded campaigns and strong barriers against lobbyists and industry-written legislation.
- soundnote 17d ago
  Jury duty used to work: As immigration continues apace, it will fail. Lee Kuan Yew had to end jury trials in Singapore because as he notes, in a multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion"
  - phtrivier 17d ago
    Do you have a link to any study about that ? That would probably not happen in Europe, but at least in the US, ethnicities can be studied, so any bias could be visible statistically ?
jrflowers 18d ago
We have a system that does that. That’s how we do jury duty. We use sortition to decide important things every day
Ygg2 18d ago
That's not how it was usually run, but say in Ancient Athen's the council that decided was whoever was at the council at that time.
krapp 18d ago
>How do you call a system of government when power is literally forced on unwilling people ? A government. All governments are coercive and premised on a few powerful elites maintaining and exercising their power with a monopoly on violence[0]. Yes, even the "good" ones. At the end of the day government, like war, is a racket. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
- phtrivier 17d ago
  I meant "unwilling people are forced to _exercise_ power". I don't know that it's the case in any representative democracies - people literally _compete_ to access power.
  - krapp 17d ago
    Ok. That would be weird. Presumably if you have power, you have the power to just quit or resign. Given how much effort people put into getting out of jury duty I can only imagine how something like sortition (which I think is what you're describing) would work. Would it be like military conscription, where you could go to prison if you're AWOL? If so, who really has the power in that scenario? And there's also the problem of competence. Forcing some random to act as Secretary of HHS is more likely to get us an RFK type than someone who knows what they're doing. But then vetting candidates with some kind of voir dire like system is just voting, except only a few people get to do it.
    - jjav 17d ago
      These are all problems. On the other hand we know for sure from centuries (millenia?) of evidence that allowing the people who most crave power to be the ones who seek and obtain said power, is a recipe for disaster as well. It is interesting to brainstorm what could be a better system. I think clear qualifications should be required. So to use the HHS example, it would have criteria to be a doctor, certain years of practice, perhaps practice in several specialties for breadth, some research experience, some administrative experience. You'd want to make the criteria narrow enough that only mostly truly qualified people meet it, but also broad enough that at least tens of thousands of people do qualify for the role, so that someone can't just easily fine-tune their resume to assure themselves a spot. It needs to be impossible to game. I don't have the answers, but clearly we can do better than the current system where only power-hungry psychopaths choose to travel the road to obtain the vast power they crave.

noir_lord 18d ago

> To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. (Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) Growing up on a diet of HHGTTG and Discworld just made me intrinsically distrust power in all it's forms.

leobg 18d ago

Sounds like an argument for aristocracy.

flir 18d ago
Or a fair die roll.
- blooalien 17d ago
  > Or a fair die roll. https://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/
dathinab 18d ago
against it, it's an argument against aristocracy think about it how do people become aristocrats if not exactly by the mechanisms which make them least suited to rule given the comments argument? Also one very common case of people being drawn to power but not suited for it if people which grew up with disposition that having that power is their "birthright" or similar. Such a disposition means from their POV losing the power, even if its due to them acting incompetent or misusing it, is no different then theft or worse "rebellion" and in turn they tend to be very willing to use a lot of violence and cruelty to keep it. so it's really an argument against any form of government which (in it's most common ways) involves people "sizing" power and tending to at least somewhat pass it forward through generations. And aristocracy in how it normally is practiced definitely falls under that. if anything it's an argument in favor of democracy, just with a lot of added rules against populism, spreading of misinformation, systematically railing up people, qualifications needed to get a position of power etc. anyway if we don't fix modern attention economics being a perfect mechanism to propagate propaganda, misinformation and hate content we will not be getting there and any current attempts to fix this seem fairly limited in effect

api 18d ago

There is a middle ground. This kind of fatalism makes people not want to try. I think we have made political office and running for it so insanely adversarial and toxic that only three kinds of people will dare sign up for it: narcissists, crooks, and ideologues who think they are on a crusade. (The latter includes a variety of religions and ideologies.) Competent sane well balanced people with reasonable balanced views of things like ideologies or for whom religion is more personal and spiritual? No way they’d go near it. People with some of these negative characteristics, like narcissism, but who are also very competent? They can make more money and get often as much prestige in business. So we don’t even get competent narcissists. Why is it so toxic? The media, the process, and us. The media and the people absolutely roast anyone running, and the winner take all process encourages a brutal slug fest. Other countries don’t have it as bad. We could start by asking what they do differently. Not being pure winner take all is one big one. They allow coalitions. That encourages alliances and dialogue. It also limits below the belt attacks since you might have to work hand in hand with these people, so you better not trash them too badly.

roryirvine 18d ago

Many (most?) politicians were traditionally (at least partly) motivated by public service, so we perhaps should consider how to reinvigorate and reinforce that. One possibility might be to specifically improve pathways into politics from sectors that still have high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education. There are likely plenty of other approaches to help balance out the pure power-seekers too, so let's work out what they are and follow as many as possible rather than encouraging fatalism.

Leonard_of_Q 18d ago
> high levels of public service motivation - eg. the civil service, judiciary, NGOs, civil infrastructure, education. Many of these are mostly known for harbouring activists, not public servants. They serve a cause, not the public and as such are just as unsuitable for politics as the usual suspects.
- Timon3 17d ago
  Just because many people think they mostly harbor activists, doesn't mean that it's true. I regularly see people getting called "activists" or "ideologues" because they serve the public instead of whatever causes their detractors want to advance.
  - roryirvine 17d ago
    Yes - reflexively denigrating anyone who's not motivated by interests that align with their own as an "activist" is likely one of the reasons why politics has become degraded in the way that it has.
    - Timon3 17d ago
      Yep, same goes for "ideologue" etc. IMO such thought-terminating cliches are a mind virus: ~10-15 years ago I noticed some people frequently using them in discussions. Today, these people are largely incapable of staying calm while listening to any opposing views, no matter the topic! (EDIT: After posting, I had the idea below) My best explanation would be: just like TikTok is harmful to our attention span, thought-terminating cliches are harmful to our tolerance for complexity.

usewik 18d ago

Eh, I prefer to lean on the less dramatic Peter principle.

Ygg2 18d ago

> People least suitable to wield power are most magnetically attracted to it. In the current system.* There are systems that allow you to distribute power more equally. It requires a different setup, like for example randomised choice. The people in power don't like it. It's much easier to bribe 2-3 career politicians and guarantee their success.

locallost 18d ago

It makes sense because anyone with experience, ability, and noble goals will give up before they start because it is too difficult. Linus Torvalds said he wouldn't have started Linux if he'd know how difficult it would be (paraphrasing here). So we are left with either people with noble goals, but either no experience or ability, or people with ability and experience, but without noble goals (what we have currently in the US). But let's not despair. We are better off than centuries ago. The consciousness that people are not there to be ruled does not happen over night. Our civilization is just getting started. A republic if you can keep it.

jappgar 18d ago

no it's just a "good times creates weak men" sort of thing. Once you're back to hard times you'll have a whole crop of reasonable people willing to wrestle power at the cost of their lives.

OroPla 18d ago

In many ways, having a king was a lot better than having a bunch of people bickering among themselves without getting stuff done. At least the king was kinda tied to the country and thus the interest of the country was part self-interest.

nisegami 18d ago

The golden path I dream of has ASI replacing human-run governments

blooalien 17d ago
> The golden path I dream of has ASI replacing human-run governments Fingers crossed, hoping for a genuinely benevolent ASI Overlord if we somehow find ourselves on that particular timeline (although, there's still a number of ways even that could go horribly awry).

gos9 18d ago

We are forever doomed to beg on our knees to be ruled in general