I think we might have a factual disagreement, which to you looks like “cousin_it is misrepresenting my opinion as being anti-democratic” and to me looks like “Benquo is misrepresenting my opinion as agreeing with Moldbug”. But it’s also ok to let things simmer down a bit, so I’ll check out.
Accountability might or might not be better served by some modes of power distribution than others, but we need accountability even to have contracts, discourse, and other types of commitment at the distances required for scale in the first place. Without relations of accountability, why should I believe that there really were 500 jurors and an unrigged ballot, or that the best explanation for some soldiers’ behavior is that there really is a living human king whose orders they follow?
It seems to me like you are assuming that any demand for an account is a bid to become the self-appointed enforcer for the relations between others. But I don’t accept that premise, so if you don’t like something that follows from what I said plus that premise, you’d need to argue for that premise to have a conversation with me.
This would explain why you are saying things that sound Moldbuggian to me but not to you. My important disagreement with Moldbug is that I do not think that monarchy is particularly helpful for substantive accountability. Because I think accountability is empirically distinct from monarchy, I don’t see why calling for accountability should seem monarchistic if we assume sincerity. But if someone thought that all calls for accountability were insincere, and really bids for “enforcer” (i.e. dominator) status, they might still dislike Moldbug’s call for accountability because they want more widely distributed patterns of domination rather than a single central pecking order. And such a person might say things that would register to me as Moldbuggian, like declaring that praise for accountability is a call for monarchy.
If that’s not an accurate characterization of your view, please explain.
I think yeah, this is very close. Though I wouldn’t call the category “accountability”; that’s your word and I think it makes the thing sound better than it actually is.
You’ve read Demons, right? You have the older generation, still basically decent guy popularizing nihilistic views (S.T.) and the younger guy putting it into practice with horrible results (Petr), at which the older guy is appalled, but the novel makes it clear that a lot of the fault is his. There’s a parallel between this and the Critias situation; I know you dismiss the link, but I wouldn’t dismiss it. Plato also felt Athenian democracy was too messy and subjective and preferred Sparta as more logical.
So instead of “accountability” maybe “nihilism”? Or “dissolving the subjective in favor of the logical”? To be clear, I do think this view can be held sincerely, without a power motive. It’s an appealing view. But I think it leads away from democracy. To have a democracy, we have to trust that people with their messy subjectivity can still be right. Otherwise we eventually end up with a system with more power at the top, and even less accountability at the top, where it matters.
EDIT: Maybe this comment should be taken as a package with Karl Krueger’s comment. In the response to him, you ask “what hazardous info”, and here I try to explain basically that.
I’ve gone to a lot of effort to say something very specific, and it seems like you’re just not interested, and have decided to try to use the comments section to try to project something stupider and simpler that’s already been said elsewhere onto what I’m saying. You could go argue with someone who has the opinion you’re trying to argue against, or you could try to explain to me specifically how what you’re saying is relevant.
You could start by describing what “the thing” you’re talking about is and how it relates to expecting people to mean something definite when they assert a justification for some action.
I think we might have a factual disagreement, which to you looks like “cousin_it is misrepresenting my opinion as being anti-democratic” and to me looks like “Benquo is misrepresenting my opinion as agreeing with Moldbug”. But it’s also ok to let things simmer down a bit, so I’ll check out.
Accountability might or might not be better served by some modes of power distribution than others, but we need accountability even to have contracts, discourse, and other types of commitment at the distances required for scale in the first place. Without relations of accountability, why should I believe that there really were 500 jurors and an unrigged ballot, or that the best explanation for some soldiers’ behavior is that there really is a living human king whose orders they follow?
It seems to me like you are assuming that any demand for an account is a bid to become the self-appointed enforcer for the relations between others. But I don’t accept that premise, so if you don’t like something that follows from what I said plus that premise, you’d need to argue for that premise to have a conversation with me.
This would explain why you are saying things that sound Moldbuggian to me but not to you. My important disagreement with Moldbug is that I do not think that monarchy is particularly helpful for substantive accountability. Because I think accountability is empirically distinct from monarchy, I don’t see why calling for accountability should seem monarchistic if we assume sincerity. But if someone thought that all calls for accountability were insincere, and really bids for “enforcer” (i.e. dominator) status, they might still dislike Moldbug’s call for accountability because they want more widely distributed patterns of domination rather than a single central pecking order. And such a person might say things that would register to me as Moldbuggian, like declaring that praise for accountability is a call for monarchy.
If that’s not an accurate characterization of your view, please explain.
I think yeah, this is very close. Though I wouldn’t call the category “accountability”; that’s your word and I think it makes the thing sound better than it actually is.
You’ve read Demons, right? You have the older generation, still basically decent guy popularizing nihilistic views (S.T.) and the younger guy putting it into practice with horrible results (Petr), at which the older guy is appalled, but the novel makes it clear that a lot of the fault is his. There’s a parallel between this and the Critias situation; I know you dismiss the link, but I wouldn’t dismiss it. Plato also felt Athenian democracy was too messy and subjective and preferred Sparta as more logical.
So instead of “accountability” maybe “nihilism”? Or “dissolving the subjective in favor of the logical”? To be clear, I do think this view can be held sincerely, without a power motive. It’s an appealing view. But I think it leads away from democracy. To have a democracy, we have to trust that people with their messy subjectivity can still be right. Otherwise we eventually end up with a system with more power at the top, and even less accountability at the top, where it matters.
EDIT: Maybe this comment should be taken as a package with Karl Krueger’s comment. In the response to him, you ask “what hazardous info”, and here I try to explain basically that.
I’ve gone to a lot of effort to say something very specific, and it seems like you’re just not interested, and have decided to try to use the comments section to try to project something stupider and simpler that’s already been said elsewhere onto what I’m saying. You could go argue with someone who has the opinion you’re trying to argue against, or you could try to explain to me specifically how what you’re saying is relevant.
You could start by describing what “the thing” you’re talking about is and how it relates to expecting people to mean something definite when they assert a justification for some action.