17 Comments

May be, lack of practical experience disqualifies, so we produce less overpaid loony elites.

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Which also means: People, unprepared & surprised by spontaneous interview are supposedly dumber than pseudo-experts, who need such foul play to fake statistics.

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Most people are not even telling you anything, so the dangerous assumption weakens the argument. Also: The reign of the elites is fascist in its roots, as conveniently the elites self-define their supremacy without ever living-up to it.

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This might relate to the way many people want the police to be unaccountable.

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I also have a problem with using the word "elite" the way Robin does. I once mentioned that Usain Bolt is elite, but he isn't in charge of much and no one wants him to be in charge of much either. The best experts are also elite, (by definition of the word elite) and so dividing people into expert and elite classes often doesn't work.

There is a cultural ideal of types of leaders - managers, politicians, and formerly monarchs, bishops, etc. This ideal changes over time, but within any one time period it seems people prefer someone of the right type to be running things so that they don't need to be concerned with things they aren't so interested in.

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Maybe "elites" just doesn't fully carry the same meaning to me, even after reading some of your other stuff on the subject.

To the extent that "elite" actually means smart and competent (eg since elite schools produce elites, the extent to which they actually select on and/or produce those qualities), sure, it makes sense for smart and competent people to run organizations.

But to the extent that "elite" just means high-social-status, or high-prestige in a way that's not correlated with actual ability, it's not at all something I prefer, and neither do others I've talked to on the topic. It's certainly possible that I and the people I've talked to are atypical.

There's certainly one caveat there: to the extent that our current system *prevents* organizations run by non-elites from succeeding, I reluctantly concede a possible need to put elites in charge. But it doesn't seem to me that that's what you're talking about (and certainly I'd prefer that *not* to be the case).

As for the distribution of existing institutions, I think that another self-consistent theory that explains it, one that seems more plausible to me, is that most people would prefer for it to be different, but current elites have a lot of power and use it to ensure that power stays within that network (explicit patronage systems are a blatant case, but I'm mostly imagining softer cases, eg the benefits of "who you know, not what you know".)

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Why are people like this?

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My data is the distribution of existing institutions, and the reactions I see when people are asked to consider various alternatives.

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'...most people want relevant institutions to take the following ideal form: masses recognize elites, who oversee experts, who pick details.'

Can you point to some empirical evidence for this? Or are you saying this is your intuition about what most people want? My intuition differs; I agree that elites often end up in charge, but it's not clear to me that that's because most people would prefer it. I'm not at all certain that you're wrong, but I'm not sure you've actually made a case for it.

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It is, indeed, futile to put forth a proposal for political reform that would work well if enough influential people understood and accepted it, and the general public at least tolerated it, but that (for whatever reason) *cannot* become popular enough ever to be instituted. But it is very hard for political theorists to make an accurate assessment of a particular proposal’s potential for popularity. I wish you good luck in making such assessments. I suspect that only very modest proposals for reform will pass an accurate potential-popularity test.

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I think that in this system, masses are really in power.But further, tat they don't independently choose their own views, but are rather influenced into choosing one of a few view points

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I'm reminded of the election of the Doge of Venice ... which was even more indirect.https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

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The problem is that we don't actually want to hold elites accountable; we want to gain the closer association to them that comes from just trusting them.

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Yes, getting more small scale tests is the limiting factor.

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I wonder if some of the gap between "what people want" and "what actually works well" could be closed by education (in the long run).

We have lots of clever theories (including yours) but too little practical experience with them. Some of the clever theories probably will work, but we can't know which without testing them.

People are reluctant to allow tests unless those tests align with "what people want". And without strong evidence from practical experience, attempting to educate people is very dangerous - that's how we ended up with crazy idealistic-totalitarian-hellhole regimes like the Soviet Union.

Maybe a way forward is to push harder on allowing small scale tests.

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>I wonder what makes the Masses => Elites <=> Experts model of decisionmaking is so universally popular, even when we have good reason to suspect that it creates poor outcomes. My guess is that we just like an elite human in the decision loop who can conceptually be held accountable for errors, even if they never actually are held accountable.

There's a guy working on some groundbreaking stuff I think answers this question. I've been following him for a while and he has a pretty convincing case this is the result of the genetic distribution of politics-relevant traits. Check out his substack: https://josephbronski.subst...

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