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>have one very good feature democracies lack - they get things done. I think this is a misconception. Chaotic system almost exclusively defeat planned systems.

>have one very good feature democracies lack - they get things done. I think this is a misconception. Chaotic system almost exclusively defeat planned systems. A chaotic market will beat communist central planning every time. A chaotic fight for life via evolution will beat robots every time, etc. Humanity's greatest achievements have been done under largely western, open, and democratic societies (for various definitions of) from ancient Greece to what the US and EU has been able to do. While autocratic systems have their success stories, they're more rare and often hit a wall due to the natural of autocracy (threaten the political order, favor system stopping innovation). You're using an American OS on an American network stack and American root DNS and American URLs on an American designed CPU in English at an American website to have this conversation for a reason. I suggest you check out Kelly's Out of Control or Taleb's Anti-Fragile.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
While it's true in general that chaotic systems tend to fare better than planned in our world, I think the problem is with limitations of human cognitive capabilities, not with the idea of planned systems per se. For one, there's a reason that successful designs tend to have one person's vision (even if many are involved in actual construction). We all know "design by committee". Secondly, > A chaotic market will beat communist central planning every time. I am starting to believe that central planning has failed so spectacularly because people can't handle that much complexity in their heads + you actually have a distributed system. If we tried that again, but with computerized economy and a centralized algorithm running global optimization, I think it could fare much better than previously, and much better than distributed market systems we have today. Yes, it will cost us some economic freedom, but this very freedom is what is driving humanity to its grave by destroying the environment and pretending we're not running out of cheap energy. > A chaotic fight for life via evolution will beat robots every time, etc. This I strongly disagree with. "Chaotic fight for life" works almost infinitely slower than human mind it crafted. It might have evolved a dog over half a millenium, but Boston Dynamics got halfway there over few years. We can optimize better and iterate faster. Evolution is cool and all, but let's not discount the minds we have and the fact that they, not biological evolution, are now the driving force on the planet.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

While it's true in general that chaotic systems tend to fare better than planned in our world, I think the problem is with limitations of human cognitive capabilities, not with the idea of planned systems per se. For one, there's a reason that successful designs tend to have one person's vision (even if many are involved in actual construction). We all know "design by committee". Secondly, > A chaotic market will beat communist central planning every time. I am starting to believe that central planning has failed so spectacularly because people can't handle that much complexity in their heads + you actually have a distributed system. If we tried that again, but with computerized economy and a centralized algorithm running global optimization, I think it could fare much better than previously, and much better than distributed market systems we have today. Yes, it will cost us some economic freedom, but this very freedom is what is driving humanity to its grave by destroying the environment and pretending we're not running out of cheap energy. > A chaotic fight for life via evolution will beat robots every time, etc. This I strongly disagree with. "Chaotic fight for life" works almost infinitely slower than human mind it crafted. It might have evolved a dog over half a millenium, but Boston Dynamics got halfway there over few years. We can optimize better and iterate faster. Evolution is cool and all, but let's not discount the minds we have and the fact that they, not biological evolution, are now the driving force on the planet.