But isn’t this more a syndrome of federalism than of centralisation? “Anyone can claim our banner and there’s no one with the authority to gatekeep and excommunicate them”. In fact the same applies to your activist example. Parties or organisations can be centralised, but movements often are not. What gets big is an idea, not any one specific group of people.
To be clear, I am using “federalism” as shorthand for “think really hard about how to structure your governance so that you can get a good balance between robustness and coordination ability” and not to just mean “small government always better”. I think this overlaps reasonably well with the historical usage of the term (based on the SEP entry), but this is not my domain of expertise, so if I am wrong, treat it as a term of art.
I like it because it’s clear that a federalist system still has a lot of government in it! It’s definitely not anarchy.
I think social movements end up at a kind of uniquely bad spot here, with “the vibes” being really quite powerful centrally coordinating forces, but anyone’s ability to ensure the vibes stay aligned with what is good being quite weak.
Fair enough. I kind of threw that line in there as a self-deprecating joke as I repeatedly kept thinking “come on, I really feel like I am saying things that are so obviously just in the water and so self-evident in common-sense morality, that it must just read as trite to any readers” during writing.
It really feels to me like the basic reasoning here is really very standard, though surprisingly untouched by LessWrong, and maybe the better pointer towards it is “classical liberalism”? I don’t know, if someone has a better pointer towards the existing thinking on this topic, happy to switch it out.
The problem with Federalism isn’t that it doesn’t capture the idea, it’s that it also requires stable delegation and authority, which this post really isn’t about. It’d partly subsidiarity, or autonomy, but also state capacity mismatch, and Fukuyama’s discussions of decay, and institutional drift, or maybe closer to fragility of complex systems, and the way they fail? (Charles Perrow’s work, specifically.)
But I think you’re talking about it differently than any of those alone, and none have a simple term for this.
We can say centralisation vs decentralisation, but I think my point holds. Centralised organizations have a single point of failure, and if that is captured the whole thing becomes corrupted, but there’s also a certain mitigating effect usually in how willing the elites are to really go wild. The failure mainly looks like being ineffectual, slow, mired in process and politics and unable to ever embrace a bolder belief even when appropriate. Meanwhile decentralised ideologies mean everyone must fill a niche and all sorts of crazy stuff can develop and not be sanctioned.
(a fun case study of two parallel developments of the same exact core idea with these two different paradigms is the Catholic Church vs Protestantism).
But isn’t this more a syndrome of federalism than of centralisation? “Anyone can claim our banner and there’s no one with the authority to gatekeep and excommunicate them”. In fact the same applies to your activist example. Parties or organisations can be centralised, but movements often are not. What gets big is an idea, not any one specific group of people.
To be clear, I am using “federalism” as shorthand for “think really hard about how to structure your governance so that you can get a good balance between robustness and coordination ability” and not to just mean “small government always better”. I think this overlaps reasonably well with the historical usage of the term (based on the SEP entry), but this is not my domain of expertise, so if I am wrong, treat it as a term of art.
I like it because it’s clear that a federalist system still has a lot of government in it! It’s definitely not anarchy.
I think social movements end up at a kind of uniquely bad spot here, with “the vibes” being really quite powerful centrally coordinating forces, but anyone’s ability to ensure the vibes stay aligned with what is good being quite weak.
I don’t think the terminology was clear. (I finished 100% of the essay and got to this comment before I understood why you picked the word.)
Fair enough. I kind of threw that line in there as a self-deprecating joke as I repeatedly kept thinking “come on, I really feel like I am saying things that are so obviously just in the water and so self-evident in common-sense morality, that it must just read as trite to any readers” during writing.
It really feels to me like the basic reasoning here is really very standard, though surprisingly untouched by LessWrong, and maybe the better pointer towards it is “classical liberalism”? I don’t know, if someone has a better pointer towards the existing thinking on this topic, happy to switch it out.
The problem with Federalism isn’t that it doesn’t capture the idea, it’s that it also requires stable delegation and authority, which this post really isn’t about. It’d partly subsidiarity, or autonomy, but also state capacity mismatch, and Fukuyama’s discussions of decay, and institutional drift, or maybe closer to fragility of complex systems, and the way they fail? (Charles Perrow’s work, specifically.)
But I think you’re talking about it differently than any of those alone, and none have a simple term for this.
We can say centralisation vs decentralisation, but I think my point holds. Centralised organizations have a single point of failure, and if that is captured the whole thing becomes corrupted, but there’s also a certain mitigating effect usually in how willing the elites are to really go wild. The failure mainly looks like being ineffectual, slow, mired in process and politics and unable to ever embrace a bolder belief even when appropriate. Meanwhile decentralised ideologies mean everyone must fill a niche and all sorts of crazy stuff can develop and not be sanctioned.
(a fun case study of two parallel developments of the same exact core idea with these two different paradigms is the Catholic Church vs Protestantism).