Maybe the most important way ambitious, smart, and wise people leave the world worse off than they found it is by seeing correctly how some part of the world is broken and unifying various powers under a banner to fix that problem
I note that the generic hypotheticals of the great king, scientist, and advocate all end in a way where the conclusion is “it would have been better if the centralization never happened”, while the actual historical cases are less clear. Yes, Rome fell, but the Pax Romana was long and many people’s lives were better as a result, and it’s unclear what the alternative would have been—possibly something much like the lives people lived after the fall and before the rise of Rome. And it’s still remembered and analyzed and learned from to this day (unlike the work of the hypothetical scientist—I think it would be a more realistic hypothetical if people remembered and used her framework, given that it was a genuine advance, but just didn’t make many further advances after that for a while because of academic incentives). Similarly with Singapore—if it grew 30x over 30 years, it seems like successors can make things worse than they are currently, but getting to the point where Singapore is 1/30th as prosperous in any similar timeframe seems unlikely. I don’t know that this is true with much certainty, but my understanding is that ideals of the French revolution inspired the American revolution, and how it went wrong was something the American founders learned from? So probably that should be counted in the “pro” column for the French revolution? EDIT: After checking, I was wrong about this, the chronology doesn’t work, most likely I was misremembering that the American revolution inspired the French revolution.
The sense I have is that decentralization is fertile ground for centralization, and centralization eventually leads to forces which cause the fall of the centralized entity, but this process doesn’t reliably lead to “maybe better to not make big thing”. More like “maybe better to design thing that works a bit like big thing, a bit like small thing, with an awareness of the advantages of each”—one example of an attempt to do something like this is Federalism.
I think the “Decentralized --> incentives for centralization --> centralized --> fall --> decentralized” cycle is like a business cycle—something that will be quite extreme if people are all just doing their locally optimal thing without a knowledge of the pattern that’s unfolding and where they are within that pattern currently, but can be smoothed out a bit with some knowledge of what’s happening—and even if it’s not smoothed out, things gained during centralization aren’t usually fully lost during decentralization, just as the (physical) capital built up during the “boom” phase of the business cycle doesn’t disappear during the “crash” phase.
Also, a nitpick from a Canadian: Canada is slightly geographically larger than the US. I originally didn’t have “slightly” in that sentence, because I thought the difference was significant, but after checking Wikipedia, it’s actually tiny, we’re about the same size. Still, the US does not cover almost all of the North American continent.
For what it’s worth the French revolution inspired almost everything else afterwards. For example Napoleon disseminated a new legal order wherever he conquered and rolling it back was hard. Italian unification was strongly driven by how Napoleon’s laws had been relatively liberal and people ill tolerated the attempt to return to the old order after the Congress of Vienna. And of course France itself kept having revolutions fairly regularly.
Also, I’m not in on all the internal politics of this community, but prima facie, quitting doesn’t seem to make sense.
Good things are good, even if they aren’t permanent. Lesswrong is good currently. The most intuitive-to-me way it would make sense to quit is if that’s somehow the way to keep the good thing going longer, or prevent it from becoming a bad thing, neither of which I see evidence for. Of course it would also make sense to quit if you’re burned out or for other emotional reasons, but from a practical standpoint, “this place is too centralized around me, should be more of a federated structure” is not a reason to quit, but to make changes so that it’s less centralized around you.
The interactions between the American revolution and the French revolution are complex. One of the most famous French revolutionaries, La Fayette, served as a general for the US revolutionaries for years on behalf of the French crown.
The French monarchy supported the American revolution for both ideological (enlightenment philosophy was somewhat widespread among the elites) and realpolitik (fuck England) reasons.
On the other hand, yeah, once the American won and established a democracy, “why couldn’t we do the same here?” was a very obvious question in everyone’s mind.
I note that the generic hypotheticals of the great king, scientist, and advocate all end in a way where the conclusion is “it would have been better if the centralization never happened”, while the actual historical cases are less clear. Yes, Rome fell, but the Pax Romana was long and many people’s lives were better as a result, and it’s unclear what the alternative would have been—possibly something much like the lives people lived after the fall and before the rise of Rome. And it’s still remembered and analyzed and learned from to this day (unlike the work of the hypothetical scientist—I think it would be a more realistic hypothetical if people remembered and used her framework, given that it was a genuine advance, but just didn’t make many further advances after that for a while because of academic incentives). Similarly with Singapore—if it grew 30x over 30 years, it seems like successors can make things worse than they are currently, but getting to the point where Singapore is 1/30th as prosperous in any similar timeframe seems unlikely.
I don’t know that this is true with much certainty, but my understanding is that ideals of the French revolution inspired the American revolution, and how it went wrong was something the American founders learned from? So probably that should be counted in the “pro” column for the French revolution?EDIT: After checking, I was wrong about this, the chronology doesn’t work, most likely I was misremembering that the American revolution inspired the French revolution.The sense I have is that decentralization is fertile ground for centralization, and centralization eventually leads to forces which cause the fall of the centralized entity, but this process doesn’t reliably lead to “maybe better to not make big thing”. More like “maybe better to design thing that works a bit like big thing, a bit like small thing, with an awareness of the advantages of each”—one example of an attempt to do something like this is Federalism.
I think the “Decentralized --> incentives for centralization --> centralized --> fall --> decentralized” cycle is like a business cycle—something that will be quite extreme if people are all just doing their locally optimal thing without a knowledge of the pattern that’s unfolding and where they are within that pattern currently, but can be smoothed out a bit with some knowledge of what’s happening—and even if it’s not smoothed out, things gained during centralization aren’t usually fully lost during decentralization, just as the (physical) capital built up during the “boom” phase of the business cycle doesn’t disappear during the “crash” phase.
Also, a nitpick from a Canadian: Canada is slightly geographically larger than the US. I originally didn’t have “slightly” in that sentence, because I thought the difference was significant, but after checking Wikipedia, it’s actually tiny, we’re about the same size. Still, the US does not cover almost all of the North American continent.
For what it’s worth the French revolution inspired almost everything else afterwards. For example Napoleon disseminated a new legal order wherever he conquered and rolling it back was hard. Italian unification was strongly driven by how Napoleon’s laws had been relatively liberal and people ill tolerated the attempt to return to the old order after the Congress of Vienna. And of course France itself kept having revolutions fairly regularly.
Also, I’m not in on all the internal politics of this community, but prima facie, quitting doesn’t seem to make sense.
Good things are good, even if they aren’t permanent. Lesswrong is good currently. The most intuitive-to-me way it would make sense to quit is if that’s somehow the way to keep the good thing going longer, or prevent it from becoming a bad thing, neither of which I see evidence for. Of course it would also make sense to quit if you’re burned out or for other emotional reasons, but from a practical standpoint, “this place is too centralized around me, should be more of a federated structure” is not a reason to quit, but to make changes so that it’s less centralized around you.
The interactions between the American revolution and the French revolution are complex. One of the most famous French revolutionaries, La Fayette, served as a general for the US revolutionaries for years on behalf of the French crown.
The French monarchy supported the American revolution for both ideological (enlightenment philosophy was somewhat widespread among the elites) and realpolitik (fuck England) reasons.
On the other hand, yeah, once the American won and established a democracy, “why couldn’t we do the same here?” was a very obvious question in everyone’s mind.