Yes, this is exactly what I do expect. There are many problems for which this is a sufficient or even good approach. There are other problems for which it is not. And there are lessons that (most?) governments seem incapable of learning (often for understandable or predictable reasons) even after centuries or millennia. This is why I specified that I don’t think we can straightforwardly say the government does or does not know a complicated thing. Does the government know how to fight a war? Does it know how to build a city? How to negotiate and enact a treaty? I don’t think that kind of question has a binary yes or no answer. I’d probably round to “no” if I had to choose, in the sense that I don’t trust any particular currently existing government to reliably possess and execute that capability.
I don’t know if I’ve ever commented this on LW, but elsewhere I’ve been known to jokingly-but-a-little-seriously say that once we solve mortality (in the versions of the future where humans are still in charge) we might want to require presidents to be at least a few centuries or a millennium old, because it’s not actually possible for a baseline human to learn and consolidate all the necessary skills to be reliably good at the job in a single human lifetime.
Yes, this is exactly what I do expect. There are many problems for which this is a sufficient or even good approach. There are other problems for which it is not. And there are lessons that (most?) governments seem incapable of learning (often for understandable or predictable reasons) even after centuries or millennia. This is why I specified that I don’t think we can straightforwardly say the government does or does not know a complicated thing. Does the government know how to fight a war? Does it know how to build a city? How to negotiate and enact a treaty? I don’t think that kind of question has a binary yes or no answer. I’d probably round to “no” if I had to choose, in the sense that I don’t trust any particular currently existing government to reliably possess and execute that capability.
I don’t know if I’ve ever commented this on LW, but elsewhere I’ve been known to jokingly-but-a-little-seriously say that once we solve mortality (in the versions of the future where humans are still in charge) we might want to require presidents to be at least a few centuries or a millennium old, because it’s not actually possible for a baseline human to learn and consolidate all the necessary skills to be reliably good at the job in a single human lifetime.