I also think I got things about right, but I think anyone else taking an outside view would’ve expected roughly the same thing.
I think you might be doing yourself a disservice. I took the majority of contemporary critcism was more directed towards (in caricature) ‘this is going to turn into a nasty cult!’ than (what I took your key insight to be) ‘it will peter out because the commander won’t actually have the required authority’.
So perhaps the typical ‘anyone else’ would have alighted on the wrong outside view, or at least the wrong question to apply it to (‘How likely would a group of rationalists end up sustaining a ‘dictator’ structure?‘, rather than ‘Conditional on having this structure, what would happen next?’)
I think you might be doing yourself a disservice. I took the majority of contemporary critcism was more directed towards (in caricature) ‘this is going to turn into a nasty cult!’ than (what I took your key insight to be) ‘it will peter out because the commander won’t actually have the required authority’.
So perhaps the typical ‘anyone else’ would have alighted on the wrong outside view, or at least the wrong question to apply it to (‘How likely would a group of rationalists end up sustaining a ‘dictator’ structure?‘, rather than ‘Conditional on having this structure, what would happen next?’)