13 Comments

Do you have a better way to generate a good list of topics?

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How important is it that everyone does thing X the same? If my neighbor does thing X different, how much does that affect me? (Differentiates Free from Vote/Rule)

How knowledgeable is each person about thing X? Is it something everyone has the ability to form an opinion on, or do you have to be an expert to even have an opinion?(Differentiates Free/Vote from Rule)

This gives us the 4 patterns:Different OK + Everyone Has Knowledge: F > V > RSame Needed + Everyone: V > F/RSame + Specialist only: R > V > FDifferent OK + Specialist only: F/R > V (Some people prefer to have the "best" answer, others prefer to make their own choice, no-one wants to be forced into something by a bunch of idiots)

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How can you be certain his gut is not accurate?

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The key thing missing here is an argument why the 16 topics you chose in any way represent a "balanced" sample of all possible topics. Without that, it's misleading to use the average response percentages or the number of choices where a plurality favors each approach as representative of anything at all, because you could make the results come out however you want by the choice of topics. In general it looks like "technocratic"-feeling things have higher ruler than vote, and "social"-feeling things have higher vote than ruler, so if you add a few more technocratic polls (e.g. "what bandwidth phones use") you could make ruler come out far ahead, and if you add a few more social polls (e.g. "which recreational drugs should be legal") you could make vote win. The extreme version of this would be adding almost exact duplicates (e.g. "standard GPU voltage", which would obviously give you much the same results as "standard CPU voltage" and thereby increase the "ruler" share); you didn't do that but I'm not convinced what you did is much better.

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There seems to be a lot more market-driven coordination (re technical standards) than most people think.

I'm not aware of any laws that say your ISP has to supply Internet Protocol per RFC such-and-such. Yet if they don't, they won't get any customers, and know it.

I suspect the same holds true for 115VAC 60 Hz power, tho maybe not for wire sizes in housing construction - in the absence of insurance.

But insurance companies creature a lot of market pressure for conformance with technical standards. If you built a house that doesn't conform (if that were legal; it's not) you'd have a very hard time getting insurance.

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Your gut tells you what you want to hear, it doesn't report what is really doing on.

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For me those questions didn't clearly point to "approving dominance". More like "I'd love to be able to outsorce this cognitive work and expect everything to go well". I live in Germany and my gut says I'm not being dominated much by our governing institutions, they work more or less for me, so why not let them decide how much space there should be between planes in the sky?

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Dominance is commonly imposed. Prestige is commonly granted. Merely asking the question is granting. Looks like you do too.

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That is the point of this post, that many people feel like you do, and want a ruler as often as democracy when they think of a particular relatively technical decision.

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If by "ruler" you mean merely a congenial standards-setting committee with a very limited scope, then I think there is a lot to be said for it. Would you prefer that your AC line voltage, the allowed 60Hz +/- delta frequency variation, and the minimum wire gauge (AWG size) used in new-home construction be set by: (A) the free choices of arbitrary individuals, (B) majority votes by the general public, or (C) a volunteer committee composed of, say, IEEE power engineers and master electricians? I choose C. But I consider myself a libertarian, so should I have chosen A?

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There's now a link in the posts to this: https://twitter.com/robinha...

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A person might be ok with separate rulers for every small domain (because none would have too much power and they could keep each other in check) while being not ok with a single ruler over all the small domains put together. Thus I'm curious how you worded your 17th, "default" poll (I can't find it) - it's possible people interpreted default-to-ruler as a single ruler for all the things, in which case opinions like the above might account for the discrepancy between the low number who chose default-to-ruler and the large number that chose ruler in specific domains.

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"It's the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation" - Loki, The Avengers ;)

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