Dominic Cummings : Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley

One nice thing about startups is that they mostly fail if they aren't good.  When MySpace stagnated there wasn't one blessed successor, there were 100 different ones that had to fight it out.  The winner is, modulo the usual capitalist alignment failure, a better company than MySpace was.  Most of its competitors weren't.  From society's perspective this filter is great, maybe the best thing about the whole startup ecosystem.

Cummings doesn't seem to know this.  Replacing the Pentagon with a new organization ABC Inc. is not the hard part (although it is pretty hard).  What's hard is to know that you should pick ABC Inc. and not DEF GmbH.  Cummings thinks what makes startups good is their youth (he wants to sunset them after 15 years, for example), but that's wrong: most young startups aren't good, and fail.  To make it work you need 100 successor Pentagons, and some way of making them compete.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this and similar proposals. On the one hand, the diagnosis seems to be correct to a significant extent, and it's something that very few others are willing to talk about, and it also explains many otherwise hard to explain facts about the lack of recognition of institutional failures after covid (though contrary to what Cummings says there has been [EA(p) · GW(p)]some such soul-searching [EA(p) · GW(p)]which I've discussed in a few previous comments).

So there's a huge amount of important, non-trivial truth to this proposal.

On the other hand, from the outside, how would you distinguish what he's proposing from an actual authoritarian power-grab?

The media portrays a ‘conservative’ government actually controlling the government as proto-fascist ... the rule of law’ is now often used as a slogan to justify judges deciding political issues

You're telling your target audience that what you are attempting will be very hard to distinguish from an authoritarian, proto-fascist, rule-of-law denying attempt to take power for yourself. I fully believe that this isn't what Cummings wants, but even assuming he's 100% sincere, this still presents a problem.

The problem is that in order to first win the election, you need to gather people who will not be put off by this appearance, but who also share your deep desire to not actually be a proto-fascist, authoritarian rule-of-law denier. Or you need to trick the actual proto-fascist authoritarians into helping you and then get rid of them once you've won.

Just because you've named the beast, doesn't make it go away. The bad institutional incentives will still be there when you try to build your new replacement startup institutions, but in this case the bad incentives will take the form of your new government disproportionately attracting people who are not put off by your don't-care-about-the-rule-of-law image. Unless you're careful, this will include lots of bad people who just want power.

I don't think that this is an insurmountable problem! Cummings himself actually did help speed up vaccine procurement and probably saved a lot of lives, FDR and Lincoln and NASA in the 1960s and his other favourite examples did exist without turning into authoritarian nightmares (mostly, this is a little debatable in the case of FDR). 

My point is that the downside of this proposal if it goes wrong isn't the status quo of more stagnation on difficult problems, it's authoritarianism that might wreck your ability to correct things in the future as well.

What's the alternative solution, aside from the 'reform' that Cummings trashes? I don't know - Cummings briefly mentions at the end that even he doesn't want to go all in on 'complete replacements' for current institutions like Balaji Srinivasan. I asked the political philosopher Jason Brennan in a recent AMA [EA(p) · GW(p)] what he thought, and he said he's even [EA(p) · GW(p)]more confident in Epistocracy now:

It's clear the agencies did a bad job, as expected, because they had perverse incentives. For instance, the FDA knows that if it approves something that works badly, it will be blamed. If it doesn't approve something or it is slow to do so, most people won't notice the invisible graveyard. 

That said, it's not clear to me whether making this a more open or democratic decision would have made it any better. Citizens are bad at long-term thinking, cost-benefit analysis, seeing the unseen, and so on. You've probably seen the surveys showing citizens were systematically misinformed about facts related to COVID and the vaccines. 

Ideally we'd structure the bureaucracies' incentives so that they get punished for the invisible graveyard, but it's unclear how to do that. I'm really not sure what to do other than trying to streamline the process of approval or requiring that any drug approved in, say, Germany, the UK, Japan, and a few other countries is automatically approved here.

...

I don't want to get caught up in words. We can use new words:

Schmoop: Small bands of experts in bureaucracies get lots of power to unilaterally decide policy which controls citizens, businesses, etc.

Vleep: During elections, use some sort of knowledge-weighted voting system.

I am in favor of Vleep but oppose Schmoop. Lots of democrats favor Schmoop despite opposing Vleep. The recent failures of various regulatory agencies are failures of Schmoop but not Vleep. Against Democracy defends Vleep but not Schmoop. 

So maybe we should do that.

In this piece, Dominic Cummings appears to be endorsing both of the following propositions:

• The current and recent-past elected leaders of the US and the UK have been incredibly useless and incompetent, leading to (e.g.) huge numbers of preventable deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic.
• It would be a good idea to have "the government actually controlling the government".

Since the second of these would put more power (maybe much more power) in the hands of those elected leaders, it seems like one of three things must be the case:

• He is confident that the only paths that lead to "the government actually controlling the government" also lead to much better leaders, perhaps because in order to grab that power they would need to be better leaders.
• He is confident that if we had "the government actually controlling the government", the real power would not be in the hands of the Trumps and Bidens and Johnsons, but of their Cummings-like advisors whom he expects to be able to wield it responsibly and effectively.
• He is lying or bulshitting or thinking unclearly somehow. (In this category I include options like: what he really wants is an authoritarian state and he doesn't much care about what it does; he hasn't noticed the tension between "give more power to the elected leaders" and "recent elected leaders have been hopeless"; he doesn't actually think as ill of those leaders as he says he does; he doesn't really want "the government actually controlling the government" but hopes that calling for that will lead to something else that he does want; etc.)

The first of those seems really naïve, unless you conflate "better" with "stronger". He mentions Lincoln and FDR as leaders who have actually controlled the government, and those are nice encouraging examples, but others who seem to have done it include Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Erdoğan, none of whom is quite so encouraging as those.

The second also seems naïve, both because political leaders with a lot of power tend to like to use it and because I don't think there's much reason to assume that political advisors of strong leaders will reliably be either wise or benevolent.

And the third is a bit of grab-bag, but none of the possibilities in that grab-bag seems very encouraging either.

As is often the case in political writing, the diagnosis of the problem seemed far more plausible than the proposed solution.

There's just something weird about the humungous proportion of career bureaucrats and governmental employees vs. the few people who get elected. E.g. according to this, in the US there are ~9 million federal employees plus ~16 million people employed by local and state governments. Contrast that with <1000 (?) federally elected politicians, and you get a proportion of >9000 unelected employees per elected politician, which sounds kind of bizarre. (In fact, in a moment of kabbalistic fortuitousness, I noticed while editing this comment that the proportion is Over 9000!)

From this perspective the problem diagnosed in Cummings' essay sounds eerily plausible.

English pedant note: it should be either "how ... look" or "what ... look like", but never "how ... look like".

Someone's been reading Yarvin. 

sort of related I wrote a really rough Practical Guide to Becoming President of The United States

Just scanned through the post.  FYI, I broadly disagree with this and a few other takes I read from Dominic Cummings when it comes to enforcing ambitious political changes based on strategies he presents as the rational choice viz a viz predicted scenarios. But don't want to get into detail here.

Highlighting this point from Dominic's summary:

The Valley is the natural place to build the best model of the electorate and some weird subculture there is more likely than DC to look at the problem with the fresh eyes it needs. It’s also the natural place to think about how to have startups replace parts of the US government and the sort of policies to pursue if you can control the government.

In response, this excerpt encapsulates a more open/less insular approach to collaborating on innovation across society that I'm more excited about:

The best we can do—as technologists, financiers, policymakers, and above all citizens—is to find ways to pursue innovation in an experimental and flexible manner, with a conscious focus on improving society as a whole. Without a spirit of collaboration, we may be limited by ideologies like technocapitalism, which promises inevitable progress and epistemic certainty while concentrating economic power, debasing public discourse, and failing to live up to its grand ideals.

Those were the last sentences from The Case Against Naive Technocapitalist Optimism. That article seems rather moderately and reasonably argued, and somewhat interesting (though doesn't dig much specifically into how technocapitalism debases public discourse or fails to live up to its grand ideals; rather points to lack of fundamental research and selectively motivated applied research delivered by the industry, and sticks to well-travelled economic ideas and issues like income disparity). 

Fascism is bad, Christian.