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

post by ChristianKl · 2021-10-02T19:35:28.871Z · LW · GW · 73 comments

This is a link post for https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/regime-change-2-a-plea-to-silicon/

Contents

73 comments

Dominic Cummings lays out how a project to change US politics could look.

73 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Taran · 2021-10-05T19:25:41.543Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: MondSemmel, TAG
comment by MondSemmel · 2021-10-06T14:52:29.760Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Is that a serious blow to Cummings' thesis, though? If your idea is, say, "we need a ministry of eduction but the current one is irrecoverably broken", you don't need to invent Google or Amazon to replace it. Depending on how bad the status quo is (which is partly an empirical question), any random thing you come up with might be better than what's already there. In which case his use of the term "startup" would be misleading, but the overall thesis would stay relatively intact.

That said, I am quite sympathetic to Chesterton's Fence in this argument. In particular, trying to abolish and replace the Pentagon on day 1 of a new administration (as Cummings suggests in his essay) is... optimistic in a world where other nations can hear you say that.

Replies from: Taran, gjm
comment by Taran · 2021-10-06T19:59:55.317Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Cummings seems to be making this same argument in the comments: the Pentagon is so unbelievably awful that its replacement doesn't have to be good, you can pick its successor at random and expect to come up with something better.  To believe this requires a lack of imagination, I think, an inability to appreciate how much scope for failure there really is.  But this is not really a question we can settle empirically -- we can only talk in vague terms about most of what the Pentagon does, and the counterfactuals are even less clear -- so I won't argue the point too much.

More seriously, not every young organization is a startup.  A new bowling team is not a startup, a new group at Amazon working on a new service is not a startup, and when Camden NJ replaced its whole police force with an entirely different organization that was not a startup either.  "Startup" has a lot of specific connotations which mostly don't apply here.  And yet, it's the word that Cummings picked.  Maybe he doesn't know this stuff, even though it's widely known to many people.  Or maybe he does know, and used it anyway.  I think this is why people keep coming up with Straussian readings of this essay: they have a sense that he's not sincere about his intended methods and goals.

For what it's worth, I don't think Cummings plans to help overthrow USG (and I don't think Yarvin does either): he's getting paid real money to rehash old grievances in front of a friendly audience, that's all.  Put him in the same bucket as Paul Krugman.

comment by gjm · 2021-10-06T18:08:11.341Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Any random thing you come up with might be better than what's already there. But it might also be worse, even if what's already there is terribly broken. Maybe there are cases where institutions are so spectacularly screwed up that literally anything you might do is likely to be better, but I wouldn't bet on there being many.

Replies from: MondSemmel, Vanilla_cabs
comment by MondSemmel · 2021-10-06T19:00:17.403Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That seems like the crux of the issue. I can absolutely imagine a world where institutions have become sufficiently bad due to misaligned incentive structures that any random thing would be an improvement (though I would still not want to settle for random).

For instance, take Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system." We might be in a situation where institutions that originally worked have increased in complexity to the point that they no longer work, in which case they might be unfixable and one would have to start over.

In any case, whether we actually live in that world seems like an empirical question, but when I compare the world of today to my sky-high expectations (from e.g. transhumanism), there are tons of institutions I would not call particularly functional.

Finally, some institutions are considered so bad by some people that they'd rather abolish them with no replacement than leave them as-is, in which case you wouldn't even necessarily need the random thing to replace it. Zvi's FDA Delenda Est stuff comes to mind.

Replies from: gjm
comment by gjm · 2021-10-07T00:39:20.606Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree that we might be in a world where the institutions are unfixably bad and the only thing to do is to start over. But if reality and your expectations diverge, I'm not sure it's a good general practice to assume that reality is at fault. Perhaps those expectations were unrealistic.

Replies from: Vanilla_cabs
comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-07T06:50:37.210Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Again, that seems like a general argument to do nothing. Like, you could have justified not rebelling against slavery when slavery was a thing in the US.

Replies from: TAG
comment by TAG · 2021-10-07T12:31:12.269Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That's not a good example, since the North already functioned without slavery.

comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-06T18:46:20.053Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You could use that as a general argument against about any change. Funny to find that on a transhumanist forum.

Replies from: gjm
comment by gjm · 2021-10-07T00:37:51.299Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Obviously what you actually have to do is to figure out whether the positives outweigh the negatives. But if all I'm offered is "things are pretty bad so any change is probably good" I'm pretty comfortably replying "new things like this are usually pretty bad so there's a real risk that the change makes things worse". :-)

Replies from: Vanilla_cabs
comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-07T07:00:06.668Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think we don't have the same way of imagining what a "random alternative" would be like. For example, I don't imagine that a random alternative would be the kind generated by a monkey randomly typing on a keyboard in a reasonable amount of time. Or even the kind generated by an unexperienced child or teenager. I imagine whoever would have the chance to enact an alternative would be more likely to understand how not to "break society by mistake" than a randomly chosen person in the population.

I might be totally off making that analogy, but you seem to me like my aunt who's afraid her computer is broken every time an unexpected window pops up in her browser. She sees her computer as something beyond comprehension, where changing even the tiniest thing could cause iredeemable damage. In reality, an experience computer user makes plenty of changes that would frighten her, but are safe. And her computer is full of useless stuff that were auto-installed by/with other stuff and slow it down.

Replies from: gjm, Taran
comment by gjm · 2021-10-07T10:53:46.542Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I endorse Taran's comment that's a sibling of this one. Most startups fail, even though they are generally run by smart hardworking people who have spotted something that could genuinely be better.

Let's run with your computer software analogy. Ever worked on the insides of a large "mature" software system? It's common for those to be full of cruft and mess and things no one quite understands and unexpected interactions, such that small changes really can cause severe damage. It's also notorious that trying to do a wholesale rewrite of such a system is usually a bad move.

The situation there is similar to the one with startups, and indeed is sometimes literally the actual same situation. Eventually your big old crufty legacy-software system will likely get replaced by something smaller and simpler that does the job well enough and is easier for its developers to work on. (That will probably be made by a startup.) But any particular attempt to replace it, your own included, is likely to fail.

Replies from: ChristianKl, Vanilla_cabs
comment by ChristianKl · 2021-10-08T19:18:11.424Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think there's a difference because the legacy software doesn't develop itself the way a bureaucracy does. It's not made up out of actors that try to get more power for themselves. 

comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-08T09:06:48.195Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree with Taran's comment as well. I possibly underestimated how likely to fail an attempt at replacing the current system is. I just think the danger of letting the situation rot is underestimated too. The world is moving on, fast. To keep the software analogy, we're keeping the same legacy software, but demanding it be used on new use cases every year. That's not sustainable. I'm open to third options.

comment by Taran · 2021-10-07T08:44:07.458Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The original startup analogy might be a useful intuition pump here.  Most attempts to displace entrenched incumbents fail, even when those incumbents aren't good and ultimately are displaced.  The challengers aren't random in the monkeys-using-keyboard sense, but if you sample the space of challengers you will probably pick a loser.  This is especially true of the challengers who don't have a concrete, specific thesis of what their competitors are doing wrong and how they'll improve on it -- without that, VCs mostly won't even talk to you.  

But this isn't a general argument against startups, just an argument against your ability to figure out in advance which ones will work.  The standard solution, which I expect will apply to transhumanism as to everything else, is to try lots of different things, compare them, and keep the winners.  If you are upstream of that process, deciding which projects to fund, then you are out of luck: you are going to fund a bunch of losers, and you can't do anything about it.

If you can't do that, the other common strategy is to generate a detailed model of both the problem space and your proposed improvement, and use those models to iterate in hypothesis space instead of in real life.  Sometimes this is relatively straightforward: if you want the slaves to be free, you can issue a proclamation that frees them and have high confidence that they won't be slaves afterward (though note that the real plan was much more detailed than that, and didn't really work out as expected).  Other times it looks straightforward but isn't: sparrows are pests, but you can't improve your rice yields by getting rid of them.  Here, to me the plan does not even look straightforward: the Pentagon does a lot of different things and some of them are existentially important to keep around.  If we draw one sample from the space of possible successors, as Cummings suggests, I don't think we'll get what we want.

comment by TAG · 2021-10-05T19:42:17.895Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Exactly! Hes mistaken survival of the salient examples for some kind of intrinsic quality.

comment by Sammy Martin (SDM) · 2021-10-05T14:15:29.181Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: TAG
comment by TAG · 2021-10-05T17:51:34.031Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Lots of bureaucracies did better than the US bureacracy, so theres a blueprint for fixing bureacracies that doesn't involve disbanding them, or implementing epistocracy.

Ideally we’d structure the bureaucracies’ incentives so that they get punished for the invisible graveyard, but it’s unclear how to do that

Other countries do it by holding enquiries and firing people.

Cummings discusses these problems in a very abstract way, as though they are universal, but things actually function differently in different places. It's noticeable that some places with strongman leaders, like Brasil, did really badly (worse than the US and UK) under COVID... while some technocratic places with bland leaders did really well.

Replies from: SDM
comment by Sammy Martin (SDM) · 2021-10-05T18:01:17.978Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree - and in fact small doses of what Cummings suggests does just look like holding enquiries and firing people, and maybe firing the leadership of a particular organisation (just not like 50% of all govt departments in one go). In fact in my original question to Brennan [EA(p) · GW(p)], I asked

For reasons it might strengthen the argument [in favour of technocracy], it seems like the institutions that did better than average were the ones that were more able to act autonomously, see e.g. this from Alex Tabarok,

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/the-premonition.html

Or this summary [EA(p) · GW(p)]

and I listed some examples of particular bureaucracies that did well in countries that in general failed (one of which was the vaccine taskforce set up, in part, by Cummings). So clearly it is possible to just get the particular thing right without solving all the systemic issues.

My point was that, if you've decided you need wholesale reform of how government makes decisions, doing a complete end-run around most existing institutions to build your 'startup' replacements has a much worse downside than e.g. experimenting with epistocracy, because it concentrates power in a really small number of people, while epistocracy doesn't.

But I don't think either is what we should be reaching for to solve a particular imminent problem.

Replies from: TAG
comment by TAG · 2021-10-05T18:18:26.504Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm not very familiar with Brennan's work, but I can't imagine how epistocracy could be feasible in the US...its just an invitation to civil war 2.0.

Edit

JB:For instance, I favor a system of enlightened preference voting where we let everyone vote but we then calculate what the public would have supported had it been fully informed

So..."we" the technocrats recalculate to get whatever result "we" like. And everyone tolerates having their actual vote erased and replaced with what they should have voted for.....yeah.

comment by gjm · 2021-10-05T15:47:28.840Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

Replies from: MondSemmel, Vanilla_cabs
comment by MondSemmel · 2021-10-06T13:57:38.861Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There are other possibilities here. For instance, Matt Yglesias has written multiple articles on abolishing the filibuster, and one of his arguments was (to badly paraphrase from my lousy memory) that it's bad in a democracy when the winners of an election can't govern, even if one considers these winners bad or evil or something.

For one thing, it means even if the winners are "good", they still can't govern. For another, it means voters get increasingly disillusioned because not enough changes after an election. And finally, if politicians are allowed to implement terrible policies, these terrible policies will actually materialize, in which case voters can learn that they're terrible, and if they don't like them they can vote the bums out who implemented them. (Of course this sets limits to what you should be able to do even with a strong majority, e.g. no-one should be able to stop elections. And separately, it assumes that the electorate has a sufficient ability to learn.)

Replies from: Vanilla_cabs
comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-07T09:56:06.857Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What's the alternative anyway? If the winners of an election can't govern, then the election is a sham. It's not only a waste of time, it's a deliberate misdirection meant to fraudulently legitimate the actual power.

comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-05T16:20:52.289Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Your point: if Cummings thinks elected leaders are incompetent, isn't it a problem that his solution is giving them more power?

The way I read it: Cummings says elected leaders are incompetent exactly (or at least firstly) because they fail to exert power. Ergo, if they did have more power, de facto they'd be less incompetent.

Replies from: gjm
comment by gjm · 2021-10-05T16:28:18.424Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That would be the possibility of conflating "better" with "stronger". I don't find the prospect of stronger leaders as such an encouraging one, because while Lincoln and FDR were strong leaders who used their strength to do good things there are plenty of examples (I think rather more) of strong leaders who used their strength to do very bad things.

Taking what I think is an optimistic view of Cummings's motivations: I think he wants strong leaders who can push through reforms that will make their country better. But if you just optimize for strong leaders, which is pretty much what he seems to be trying to do, I think the default outcome is that you get strong leaders who can push through reforms that will make their country worse.

Replies from: Vanilla_cabs
comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-05T16:47:28.610Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If a strong leader is a prerequisite for any improvement, what choice do we have? I think that's his point of view, and it makes sense (as in, it's consistent). The way to counter it would be to show a path to lasting improvement that does not require a strong leader.

Replies from: TAG
comment by TAG · 2021-10-05T17:34:36.530Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

a strong leader is a prerequisite for any improvement, what choice do we have?

If you are not in the worst possible dystopia, you have the choice of sticking with what you've got.

Replies from: Vanilla_cabs
comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-05T20:07:06.454Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Then you face having to make the same choice in 10 years but with worse options.

Replies from: daniel-kokotajlo
comment by Daniel Kokotajlo (daniel-kokotajlo) · 2021-10-06T14:19:29.540Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Depending on AI timelines etc., this may be fine.

Replies from: Vanilla_cabs
comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-06T15:01:54.194Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

True. I just want to point out the irony on hoping for a providential all-powerful machine in order to avoid relying on a providential all-powerful human. What makes you think the AI saviour will be in more virtuous hands?

Replies from: daniel-kokotajlo
comment by Daniel Kokotajlo (daniel-kokotajlo) · 2021-10-06T15:07:50.456Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't think that.

comment by MondSemmel · 2021-10-06T15:13:12.780Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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.

comment by ESRogs · 2021-10-03T05:03:53.757Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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

comment by Tomás B. (Bjartur Tómas) · 2021-10-02T20:16:07.897Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Someone's been reading Yarvin. 

Replies from: 48288ueu77bgd3727
comment by 48288ueu77bgd3727 · 2021-10-02T20:20:43.879Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

He explicitly cites him at the end!

comment by njv · 2021-10-04T03:44:13.534Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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

comment by Remmelt (remmelt-ellen) · 2021-10-12T18:19:59.385Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

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). 

Replies from: ChristianKl
comment by ChristianKl · 2021-10-12T21:15:16.666Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't think Cummings believes what the article calls technocapitalism. It defines as a fundamental aspect:

Furthermore, they believe that technological innovation is necessarily created by private enterprise, and in particular through the institution of the startup, funded by private venture capital funds.

If you read Cummings recruiting call for wierdo's he calls for creating significant technical innovation within government with new technologies like seeing rooms which don't seem to be developed by private for-profit enterprise. 

The general idea is that the government used to be able to do technological innovation and that a government that controls the government could again get the government to do technological innovation that's currently not done.

When Cummings speaks about "startups replacing parts of the US government" he's not talking about privately funded and owned companies replacing parts of the US government but about creating new governmental organizations. 

Cummings says very explicitely:

We also need institutional change to allow a re-organisation of expert attention on important problems. Academia and markets are not aiming the most able people at our biggest problems. 

Replies from: remmelt-ellen
comment by Remmelt (remmelt-ellen) · 2021-10-13T21:13:39.081Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Ah, I was vaguely under the impression indeed that Dominic’s article suggested for-profit tech start-ups would replace government departments. So thanks for correcting that impression.

To be clear though, that’s not core to what I’m disagreeing about here. My disagreement here is not about for-profit entities coming in and running operations more efficiently, it’s about insular monopolistic actors privileging their technical expertise for deciding how to built the systems that will hold sway over the rest of society, while attempting little real dialogue with the diverse persons whose lives they will impact.

IMO Taiwan’s g0v collaborative is an impressive example of technical innovation for amongst others resolving disinformation and tensions between the polar sides of technocratic/technocapatalistic top-down enforcement and populist bottom-up destabilisation (tricky not to get stuck in political idealogy when discussing those issues).

Just read these articles on g0v and vTaiwan. They’re kinda idealistically promotional, but still highly recommend them:

As a case in point, I would try comparing

  • Cumming’s conception of a seeing room, which from a casual glance seems to be about providing key government decision-makers with a more accurate and more processable overview for making a big decision.
  • with the way vTaiwan activists compile digestable information from responses to ‘rolling surveys’ amongst stakeholders and relevant experts, before inviting them to deliberate and build a rough consensus on stances online.
Replies from: ChristianKl
comment by ChristianKl · 2021-10-22T20:03:41.381Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

To be clear though, that’s not core to what I’m disagreeing about here. My disagreement here is not about for-profit entities coming in and running operations more efficiently, it’s about insular monopolistic actors privileging their technical expertise for deciding how to built the systems that will hold sway over the rest of society, while attempting little real dialogue with the diverse persons whose lives they will impact.

Cummings describes how their focus group's found that people in them were talking about wanting an immigration system like Australia and then they added that wish into their platform.

Focus groups usually don't give you very detailed policies but part of the plan with them is to do create a platform that actually includes all those things that 70-80% of the population want and that currently gets ignored. 

IMO Taiwan’s g0v collaborative is an impressive example of technical innovation for amongst others resolving disinformation and tensions between the polar sides of technocratic/technocapatalistic top-down enforcement and populist bottom-up destabilisation (tricky not to get stuck in political idealogy when discussing those issues).

Audrey Tang was a hacker from Silicon Valley who wanted to do innovation in politics. That's not possible in the US or UK right now but is in Taiwan, so they went back to Taiwan to do it there where they created what would be a startup in Cummings sense of the word. Audrey Tang is completely the kind of person Cummings wanted to hire in his call for weirdo's.

I don't think there's any good basis for suggesting that Cummings wouldn't want systems to listen to diverse experts.

When Cummings worked in the Department of Education, that department was so disfunctional as he describes that it couldn't repair the lift in their building. There are a lot of decisions involved in making such a system more functional that are not about building some policy consensus. Making good organizations about organizing large government departments is important.

(tricky not to get stuck in political idealogy when discussing those issues).

Yes, people like you or Glen Weyl let political idealogy cloud their ability to see clearly and that leads to errors just as thinking that what Cummings means when he says startup is something private. 

Cummings explicitly tells everyone that they have to watch Brad Victors videos and Dynamicland. Brad Victor setup Dynamicland in a way that's very intentional about not building technology average early tech adopter but for a wide variety of diverse people. 

The main political fight is whether you want an enviroment where radically new departments (and that includes things like the one that Audrey Tang runs) are possible or not and not about the individual choices of technology. 

Replies from: remmelt-ellen, remmelt-ellen
comment by Remmelt (remmelt-ellen) · 2021-10-26T10:13:24.877Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Started watching this talk by Bret Victor on representing code for humans. Interesting, thanks for the share

comment by Remmelt (remmelt-ellen) · 2021-10-26T09:46:26.656Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I would be careful here about ascribing some singular definitive personal motivation to why I’m sharing these opinions (in the vain of ‘he and that other guy he talked with are clouded by ideology and that’s why he jumped to this factually incorrect conclusion’ or ‘he didn’t announce the names of the authors of a draft so based on that one can conclude this person doesn’t prioritise transparency’). Particularly when you quickly spot something about my take to disagree with, and might only grasp a small portion of where I’m coming from. Better to first have an actual face-to-face conversation and listen, paraphrase, and check in on each other’s views along with the context needed to interpret them. I’m deliberately not characterising you here based on your comments. I try somewhat awkwardly to stay open to what I’m missing.

That having said, you’ve clearly read a lot more about Dominic Cummings' work than I have. I appreciate the detailed remarks. They help me break up and reassemble the broad impressions I personally got from reading a few blogposts.

On getting input from focus groups from 70-80% of the population – is the focus here on soliciting and addressing commonly held or majority views that are ignored, or also on aggregating distinct minority views?

Brad Victor setup Dynamicland in a way that's very intentional about not building technology average early tech adopter but for a wide variety of diverse people.

This sounds cool. Let me watch a video of his.

On setting up organisations that can manage themselves, I agree that this seems a major problem in the US government for instance (and also in e.g. the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the stories I’ve heard of gross misspending and budgets reallocated to political ends from insiders involved there). This EconTalk podcast suggested actually recruiting an experienced chief operating officer in the US government, or at least to oversee an effective central auditing department. I don’t have strong opinions about that one – only that the incentives and power dynamics that you’re enmeshed in within such a big bureaucracy seem really tricky to work with.

The main political fight is whether you want an enviroment where radically new departments (and that includes things like the one that Audrey Tang runs) are possible or not

Did you mean that this is what Dominic Cummings or perhaps you would see as the main political fight here? I wouldn’t define it as such. I guess part of the tension in our conversation comes from talking past each other about what you could see as two separate agendas.

comment by IlyaShpitser · 2021-10-04T21:11:05.040Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Fascism is bad, Christian.

Replies from: TAG, ChristianKl
comment by TAG · 2021-10-04T22:14:51.914Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I would appreciate if you could expand a bit, or sober up, or whatever.

comment by ChristianKl · 2021-10-05T07:17:52.329Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The present US regime is already pretty fascist. I have no clear reason to assume that making the system more demoractic (as in, increasing the power of democratically legitimized people) in the way Cummings proposes would lead to a more facist state of affairs.

Replies from: gjm, IlyaShpitser
comment by gjm · 2021-10-05T16:04:00.101Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It is not obvious that "increasing the power of democratically legitimized people" necessarily actually makes a system "more democratic", and it is still less obvious that it makes it better. For instance: the President of the United States is democratically elected, but replacing the system currently laid down by the US constitution by one in which the president has dictatorial power would not obviously make it more democratic, and I claim that even if by some measures it were a more democratic system, it would none the less be a worse one.

Cummings's proposals would concentrate power more, in something like the same way though hopefully not so drastically.

Calling Cummings's proposal fascist seems overheated to me, but I think Ilya's right that it's a move in the direction of fascism rather than away from it. He wants

  • a lot of power concentrated in the hands of the government ("a government that controls the government"), and more specifically of its leader ("a President who actually controls the government")
    • How much power? Well, enough that it would "allow x1000 more progress" compared with e.g. the present state of affairs.
  • that leader put into power by a combination of
    • the efforts of a small number of very rich people
    • appealing to "lowest common denominator" concerns of The People
      • but note that he assumes that those very rich people, and the would-be leader they'd be funding and advising and providing political-manipulation services for, can decide that they want to do this before finding out exactly what it is that The People want, so it's not like Cummings wants the real agenda to be democratically decided

and while that doesn't come all that close to amounting to fascism, even when he points to Curtis Yarvin as a good person to listen to, it's not exactly not fascist, if you see what I mean.

Replies from: Vanilla_cabs, ChristianKl
comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-05T16:39:52.621Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't disagree. But also, I'm old enough that I have seen many alternative governments proposed. Each time society lets go of a deal that could unblock it, the next deal is worse. And the status-quo is also getting worse. It's not rare to find a refused deal emerge in the status quo ten years later, without the potential good sides.

Replies from: ChristianKl
comment by ChristianKl · 2021-10-06T10:04:49.754Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
  • I haven't seen proposals on the scale such as abolishing the Pentagon seriously considered or persued before.
Replies from: Vanilla_cabs
comment by Vanilla_cabs · 2021-10-06T11:26:03.860Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
  1. have you waited 10 years?
  2. too specific. Of course, the establishment won't self-destroy. But it might use the pattern of "abolish an institution that's in their way under the pretense of the need for radical change and the unreformability of the target". It might be, I don't know, the Constitution, or something else.
comment by ChristianKl · 2021-10-06T09:51:22.035Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Whether it's a more in the direction of facism or away from it depends a lot on how facist you consider the current institutions to be. 

Last year with the lab leak hypothesis strong political censorship about important issues started in the US. It expanded to other political topics so that someone like Bjørn Lomborg gets censored for citing peer reviewed journal articles and saying the wrong thing on climate change.

Under Eric Holder the Associated Press got attacked and there's no reason to assume that such attacks won't continue and got stronger as time goes on the current course.

The right to kill citizens of your own country without judical process is one of the core dictatorial ones and also was claimed for the executive branch under Obama. It was mainly about foreign terrorism. Now you have a debate about how domestic terrorism like the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated more with the tools used for foreign terrorism.

but note that he assumes that those very rich people, and the would-be leader they'd be funding and advising and providing political-manipulation services for, can decide that they want to do this before finding out exactly what it is that The People want, so it's not like Cummings wants the real agenda to be democratically decided

For the plan that Cummings proposes it's necessary to campaign on the plan that you actually want to implement. Without doing that you won't be able to get the necessary senate/congressional votes. 

a lot of power concentrated in the hands of the government ("a government that controls the government"), and more specifically of its leader ("a President who actually controls the government")

I don't think having a president that controls the US military is more facist then having a military industrial complex controling the US military. A lot of power that currently resides in the US government is not controlled by the president and facist and you get rid of it by removing the relevant institutions.

and while that doesn't come all that close to amounting to fascism, even when he points to Curtis Yarvin as a good person to listen to, it's not exactly not fascist, if you see what I mean.

He points to Curtis for an analysis how current power structures work and not for the solutions that he advocates.

Replies from: gjm
comment by gjm · 2021-10-06T12:20:07.285Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What exactly do you mean by "political censorship"? Has it been made illegal to say that SARS-CoV-2 came out of a lab, or that climate change isn't a big deal? Last I heard, Lomborg was still publishing books and giving speeches and so forth.

Your paragraph beginning "The right to kill citizens" seems like it's saying that there's debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial. If that's so, let's see the evidence of that debate. If not, maybe dial down the dishonest rhetorical techniques a bit?

Cummings's plan does require that your campaign acknowledges that you're going to try to reboot a lot of the institutions of government. It doesn't, so far as I can see, require that you say very much about just how they new versions are going to be better than the old. And, I repeat: Cummings explicitly proposes a scheme of the following form: get a team together, find a suitable candidate, then start figuring out what you need to say to get lots of people to vote for them. There's no step in his process where you say "shit, what the people want isn't what we want, so let's give up" or "... so let's change our plans". The populist stuff is just there to get power, so far as I can see.

Replies from: ChristianKl
comment by ChristianKl · 2021-10-06T14:50:20.459Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What exactly do you mean by "political censorship"? Has it been made illegal to say that SARS-CoV-2 came out of a lab, or that climate change isn't a big deal? Last I heard, Lomborg was still publishing books and giving speeches and so forth.

There's political pressure on institutions to censor content. 

Most of the social networks did censor the lab leak hypnothesis in 2020 and it worked to remove it for a year from public discussion. The tools of censorship employed were strong enough for that.

Lomborg got censored on Facebook for citing something from a scientific paper about how climate change reduces deaths due to freezing.

Your paragraph beginning "The right to kill citizens" seems like it's saying that there's debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial. 

No, it's not. The debate about whether or not the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated as terrorists is had on the abstract level and not on the concrete level. 

Generally, civil rights violations are never discussed in the specifics before they are committed. When the congress was classifying Wikileaks as a non-state-intelligence organization and while the CIA was internally talking about using that as a justification for assassinating Assange they also didn't discuss that explicitely. 

The focus on what should be done with the people who stormed the capital also completely ignores what the issue is about. It's not about doing something different in the past but about increasesing the options about how to fight perceived problems in the future. 

Replies from: gjm
comment by gjm · 2021-10-06T19:27:14.388Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

So far as I can tell, Lomborg didn't get censored on Facebook. The thing he posted had a thing added by Facebook saying "this is false". That's not what censorship is. (Maybe something of his was actually removed by Facebook? But I can't see anything claiming that it was. All I see is that Facebook added a "fact-checking" notice and Lomborg is cross about that.)

If you weren't trying to suggest that there's debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial, then that paragraph of yours where you talked about them can only be a deliberately misleading rhetorical move. You start by talking about "the right to kill citizens of your own country without judicial process". You go on to say "It was mainly about foreign terrorism". And then it's straight into "Now you have a debate about how ... the people who stormed the Capitol should be treated more with the tools used for foreign terrorism".

This is not what we are meant to be about here.

Replies from: skeptical_lurker
comment by skeptical_lurker · 2021-10-07T16:25:42.893Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

>If you weren't trying to suggest that there's debate about whether the people who stormed the Capitol should be executed without trial,

There isn't debate: Ashli Babbitt was de facto executed without trial (unless there is an objective legal principle where a male police officer can shoot an unarmed woman for breaking into a government building) and the shooter is described as a hero by the main levers of power, with no debate. The mass execution of capitol rioters might occur within a few years, I give it perhaps a 5% chance. 

Now this might seem like I'm trying to build sympathy for the Republican cause, but I am actually not. It is wiser to side with the winner than the loser, and I for one welcome America's new fascist overlords.

Replies from: BossSleepy, gjm
comment by Randomized, Controlled (BossSleepy) · 2021-10-07T16:39:17.046Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I have not looked into the the details of Jan 6th deeply, but my understanding is that this was something like a riot, in which a large group of civilians were trying to enter the capital, without authorization, to disrupt part of the election process.

If the police officer who shot Babbitt was tasked with defending the Capital, then, even if there was poor judgement on his part, it seems really unreasonable to call his actions an execution. An execution is carried out, generally by a state, as part of a deliberative, measured process of deploying force. This is a distinction I think most people would appreciate.

The mass execution of capitol rioters might occur within a few years, I give it perhaps a 5% chance.

Define "mass" and "a few years" I'll consider taking the other side of this bet.

Replies from: skeptical_lurker
comment by skeptical_lurker · 2021-10-07T17:11:22.196Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

>If the police officer who shot Babbitt was tasked with defending the Capital, then, even if there was poor judgement on his part, it seems really unreasonable to call his actions an execution. An execution is carried out, generally by a state, as part of a deliberative, measured process of deploying force. This is a distinction I think most people would appreciate.

You are correct, this is an important distinction. My impression is that there was no grounds for the officer to think that his life was in danger - since he is a man he could have physically restrained the woman without a risk of her wrestling the gun from his hands - therefore he doesn't really have a justification of panicking, and he could deliberate and decide to kill her. Furthermore, the legal system had time to deliberate and decide not to charge him, which greenlights lethal force in any future similar situation. 
 

Suppose in 2024, there is an argument at a polling station over accusations of misconduct. An officer might reason that he can start shooting republicans, by the precedent jan 6th set. 


Its not an execution in the sense of a deliberate sentence, its the judicial system deliberately turning a blind eye. 

>Define "mass" and "a few years" I'll consider taking the other side of this bet.

10 years, and at least 10% dead (of those who actually stepped foot inside the capitol) with the majority of the rest in some kinda gulag, or having fled the country, or in non-democrat controlled territory in a civil war. The deaths could follow a trial, or could be execution by mob or whatever.

If 5% seems high, there seems to be civil wars on average once every 200 years or so, and tensions seem very high now. 

Replies from: BossSleepy, lalaithion
comment by Randomized, Controlled (BossSleepy) · 2021-10-07T19:36:25.267Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My impression is that there was no grounds for the officer to think that his life was in danger - since he is a man he could have physically restrained the woman without a risk of her wrestling the gun from his hands - therefore he doesn't really have a justification of panicking, and he could deliberate and decide to kill her.

Was she part of a crowd?

Furthermore, the legal system had time to deliberate and decide not to charge him, which greenlights lethal force in any future similar situation.

It seems like American cops are generally given a lot of leeway to make use-of-force decisions and that legal system has generally been reluctant to discipline cops for this. This seems bad, but importantly different from an 'execution'.

10 years, and at least 10% dead (of those who actually stepped foot inside the capitol) with the majority of the rest in some kinda gulag, or having fled the country, or in non-democrat controlled territory in a civil war. The deaths could follow a trial, or could be execution by mob or whatever.

If 5% seems high, there seems to be civil wars on average once every 200 years or so, and tensions seem very high now.

Tensions do seem high right now, but I don't know if they're at an all time or high or otherwise unique. Dan Carlin has often mentioned the numerous domestic bombings in the 70s; this Rand article says there were 1,470 domestic attacks in the US in the 70s.

I think if you're going to redefine 'execution' to include some forms of police violence at protests or riots, the bet is going to become too vague to be likely decidable. I'd also decline that bet, as we're already sampling from a population that's shown itself to be willing to show up to potentially kinetic protests, and I can't easily find out enough about the group I'd be betting on.

Replies from: skeptical_lurker
comment by skeptical_lurker · 2021-10-07T20:55:52.453Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

>Was she part of a crowd?

Yes, but they could only fit through the broken door slowly one at a time, so they couldn't rush the officer. 

Incidentally, I realise that my comment sounds pro-republican because I'm talking about what I see as a democrat executing a republican. But I'm sure many republicans would love to execute democrats too, its just that at the moment the democrats seem to have far more power, and so its far more likely that democrats start executing many republicans than vice versa. Either way, my point is that mass violence is an order of magnitude higher now than it was a few decades ago.

>Dan Carlin has often mentioned the numerous domestic bombings in the 70s; this Rand article says there were 1,470 domestic attacks in the US in the 70s.

Yes, and the US government might have collapsed in the 70s. I remember that the national guard shot some anti-war protestors. Did any major politicians or journalists condone this? (I genuinely don't know the answer) Anyway, grassroots violence won't collapse a government without elite support, and what I'm saying is that the elites seem to be endorsing violence now. Additionally I don't think an election has been contested like this ever?

>I think if you're going to redefine 'execution' to include some forms of police violence at protests or riots, the bet is going to become too vague to be likely decidable.

I'm not thinking of one or two rouges killing people, I'm thinking of a significant escalation. The riots would eventually become paramilitary death squads, I suppose. 


This could be made precise by, say, specifying that the death toll per capita has to equal the French revolution. Speaking of which, I don't think I would have been able to predict what would happen in the French revolution. Standing in 1789, a prediction of mass murder followed by a giant war would sound paranoid.

(I know I said I would stop talking about politics, but I thought I might as well continue this thread)

comment by lalaithion · 2021-10-07T17:17:11.753Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The officer fired a single shot into a crowd of individuals who were breaking down a barricaded door. I think that even the strongest police officer would have a difficult time subduing 20 people peacefully.

comment by gjm · 2021-10-07T16:52:23.293Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

US police officers shoot people while they are (or seem, to the police officers, to be) in the course of committing crimes all the time. Sometimes they kill them by other means besides shooting. Usually the crime they're supposedly committing is less serious than storming a government building amid cries to murder the vice-president. Sometimes there's not the least reason to think they're committing any crime at all.

In some of the more obviously appalling cases there's a public outcry about this. The great majority of the time, there isn't. There are about 31,000 entries in the spreadsheet at Fatal Encounters, for instance; how many of those met with any more opposition or complaint than the killing of Ashli Babbitt?

If, as I contend, most of them weren't, why should we take the shooting of Ashli Babbitt (in the course of committing a violent crime) as evidence that the US is headed into fascism and mass executions in the next few years, when we don't draw any such conclusions from tens of thousands of other police killings?

(An aside: I was curious about where you were coming from, so to speak, so I had a quick look at your LW comment history. It seems that you post about pretty much nothing but politics (including under that heading highly-politicized topics such as race). I think we have different ideas about what LW is for.)

Replies from: skeptical_lurker
comment by skeptical_lurker · 2021-10-07T17:41:27.398Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

>If, as I contend, most of them weren't, why should we take the shooting of Ashli Babbitt (in the course of committing a violent crime) as evidence that the US is headed into fascism and mass executions in the next few years, when we don't draw any such conclusions from tens of thousands of other police killings?

Heading into mass executions with perhaps 5% probability is what I said. 

The point is that the police make mistakes, but now it seems that whether an action is justified depends on political affiliation. If there were a similar event, of a republican killing a democrat and seeming to get away with it on pure political affiliation grounds, I would be similarly worried. BTW, events like the storming of the Bastille also involved very few deaths, but rapidly escalated in the next few years.

>(An aside: I was curious about where you were coming from, so to speak, so I had a quick look at your LW comment history. It seems that you post about pretty much nothing but politics (including under that heading highly-politicized topics such as race). I think we have different ideas about what LW is for.)

This comment depressed me. I'm not actually politically active, and I don't think that I or others should be really. I have many points of disagreement with both parties. In many ways I'd rather no party had all that much power. I talk about politics because ... its the impulse to tribal politics getting its hooks into my brain. If I think that there is a 5% chance of mass murder, I think for most of us the best thing to do is just... ignore it, unless it gets a lot worse, in which case the best thing to do is probably just leave, if you can.

 

Frankly you're right, I have been using LW wrong (and so has everyone else that talks about politics).

 

Is there some way I can delete my account and all my posts? 

Replies from: BossSleepy
comment by Randomized, Controlled (BossSleepy) · 2021-10-07T19:43:35.637Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Is there some way I can delete my account and all my posts?

You could contact the admin team and ask, but alternatively, consider instead create a new account and engaging with non-political stuff -- this comment is pretty introspective and open to criticism, which I think is even more LW-y than being "smart".

Replies from: skeptical_lurker
comment by skeptical_lurker · 2021-10-07T21:03:38.960Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

>this comment is pretty introspective and open to criticism, which I think is even more LW-y than being "smart".

Thanks. 

I'm not going to delete my posts on second thoughts, it would not be fair to those who have replied to me. I sort of feel that all political posts should just be moved to a walled off area for cognitive hazards. I am however, committing to staying away from politics.

Perhaps I will create a new account.

comment by IlyaShpitser · 2021-10-05T18:29:18.063Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What Cummings is proposing is formalism with a thin veneer of silicon valley jargon, like "startups" or whatever, designed to be palatable to people like the ones who frequent this website.

He couldn't be clearer, re: where his influences are coming from, he cites them at the end.  It's Moldbug, and Siskind (Siskind's email leaks show what his real opinions are, he's just being a bit coy).

The proposed system is not going to be more democratic, it is going to be more formalist.

Replies from: gjm, jimrandomh
comment by gjm · 2021-10-05T23:36:39.909Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

(I wonder why you say "Moldbug" rather than "Yarvin" but "Siskind" rather than "Alexander" or "Scott".)

If your reading of anything Scott's written is that he favours anything like neoreaction, then it's a very different reading from mine. My reading is that he thinks neoreaction is mostly garbage but with occasional valuable insights. His actual words in what I suspect is the same leaked email as you're talking about: "Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them." My mental model of Scott is not excited by the prospect of Dominic-Cummings-alikes finding a way to get a populist president installed who will bulldozer all the bureaucratic obstacles between himself and absolute power.

I'm not familiar enough with the details of Yarvin's ideas to know how closely aligned Cummings's proposal is to Yarvin's "formalism". (It doesn't looks super-close to me, though.)

For the avoidance of doubt, I do agree that Cummings is generally Up To No Good (though I don't hate him as intensely as the UK media fairly clearly wants me to), I wouldn't trust him any further than I could throw him, and I don't think his proposals here are likely to end well if anyone tries to put them into action.

comment by jimrandomh · 2021-10-05T19:29:32.723Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Downvoted for ad hominem. Having drawn inspiration from an author you don't like is not an argument against anything. Saying you don't like some authors without making reference to any specific positions those authors have is an invitation to contentless flamewar.

Replies from: Zack_M_Davis, TAG, IlyaShpitser
comment by Zack_M_Davis · 2021-10-05T20:41:31.101Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Many of the specific points in the post do seem to be copied from Moldbug/Yarvin's recent work, more so than you might guess if you're not familiar with it, and only saw Yarvin listed along with Alexander/Hanania/Sullivan/Shor at the end—not just the idea of the executive shutting down entrenched bureaucracies, but the framing of the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations as once-in-70-years de facto regime changes, and the specific citation of Roosevelt's inaugural address as a primary source.

I think it does make sense to read it in that context. A casual reader might come away with the impression that (as ChristianKI puts it) Cummings is proposing "making the system more demoractic (as in, increasing the power of democratically legitimized people)". Whereas if you know that Cummings is reading off of Yarvin's playbook, it's a lot clearer that being more democratic probably isn't the point. (In Yarvin's worldview, it's about temporarily using the forces of democracy to install a king who will govern more competently than a distributed bureaucratic oligrachy.)

Analogously, if some article talked about alignment of present-day machine-learning systems and cited Yudkowsky as one of several inspirations, but the specific points in the essay look like they were ripped from Arbital (rather than proportionately from the other four authors listed as inspirations), you'd probably be correct to infer that the author has given some thought to superintelligent-singleton-ruling-over-our-entire-future-lightcone-forever scenarios, even if the article itself can't cross that much inferential distance [LW · GW].

Replies from: ChristianKl
comment by ChristianKl · 2021-10-06T10:02:36.481Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yarvin advocates installing a king who not just controls the government but also institutions outside of the government. 

Cummings proposes installing someone with a role like FDR. I do consider FDR to be democratically legitimated and his frequent reelection a sign that the population liked him governing the way he did.

comment by TAG · 2021-10-05T19:37:18.037Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That's a fair standard so long as it's applied fairly. But applying it fairly means you can't complain about Aumann being a theist, and so on.

Replies from: habryka4
comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2021-10-05T19:40:18.267Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Having specific theistic beliefs seems very different than "having drawn inspiration" from someone.

comment by IlyaShpitser · 2021-10-05T22:02:35.549Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I am not going to waste my time arguing against formalism.  When it comes to things like formalism I am going to follow in my grandfather's footsteps, if it comes time to "have an argument" about it.

Replies from: jimrandomh
comment by jimrandomh · 2021-10-05T22:35:42.661Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm happy to disengage, then. But for the record, I don't actually know what you mean by formalism in this context; you seem to think that it's a dreadful thing to accuse someone of, but the OP doesn't use the word at all, you never define it, and the Wikipedia page is irrelevant enough to the post that I'm pretty sure you must mean something else.

Replies from: TAG
comment by TAG · 2021-10-05T22:45:16.433Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Formalism is Moldbug's name for his own politicaal theory. It isn't prominent enough to have a WP article. I would guess that Ilya associates it with another political system beginning with the letter F.