Conversation

Replying to
You know what this feels like? It's a "Wall" except with "Science Scare" rather than "Brown Immigrants" as the rallying flag. To the extent the "Science Scare" is real, it's not meaningfully acted upon. To the extent it's an expedient scare, it's a means to other ends :(
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If this is the best democracy can do in a world based on really complex technologies and global intertwingling, then I see why many see democracy (and more broadly, the nation state as a problem solving unit) as the problem. Still there's a bit of hope.
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First there is hope that it is possible to make the *processes* of democracy more scientifically literate somehow, in ways that are not quite as anemic as having toothless scientific committees "advising" politicians. Can we add more teeth to scientific influence over policy?
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Maybe. After all, we ended up in a place where corporations are people, and can influence politics in a very toothy way with money, directly (a condition I am broadly in favor of btw, even if the specific mechanics leave much to be desired...). Perhaps ideas can be people too?
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Second, the practice of lumping together popular and unpopular policy pieces was expedient pragmatism in a low-tech world, but in a complex tech world, is suicidal. I don't think there's anything necessarily either "democratic" there or psychologically fundamental.
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Not quite sure how you retain a democratic spirit in political processes, but I have a few at least theoretical, spherical-cow ideas. For example, I proposed somewhere once that everybody on the planet should have at least a small fractional vote in all elections.
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What is clear is that we're still running political infrastructure based on politicians' ideas of mass psychology that haven't evolved in 200 years, coupled with a technological imagination that hasn't moved an inch since Apollo. We're being governed by 1761 minds living in 1961.
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I don't know what *is* the right action plan here. All I have an idea about is what science+tech+policy experiments are at least worth trying. The problem with GND is that it corners attention/agency in a way that makes those experiments harder.
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Final point, a few are reading this thread like vindication of a Trump-equivalence on . I don't endorse that. There is no comparison between the two. She's just a regular human politician, perhaps more charismatic and principled than average. Trump is a class IV void demon.
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Venkatesh, no is just as racist as Trump is, openly so. She also ignores the death and imprisonment of a 100 million people who lived under Marxist regimes all over the world. All of the ideas that created those outcomes are present in her rhetoric.
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Go read the stated goals of her party and compare them to Chavismo or any other marxist charter. They dress it up to make it palatable to other Democrats but there is no substantive difference. Derp yourself.