This is what you get when you have "grassroots democracy," when any unemployed busybody can show up at a council meeting and demand a new rule or a new vote.
Fareed Zakaria has commented on this problem extensively.
The dictatorship of the articulate
21–30 of 409 posts
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#22"Dictatorship of the Articulate" is a quality phrase. The actual piece is a waste of time. Andreesson capitalism build worship supplemented by for instance American Enterprise Institute propaganda that does not reflect reality. Would downvote if I could.
It really is a great phrase. I think there's some truth to it. As someone who can be very articulate at times, the influence it lends me isn't always commensurate with my actual skill in that area. Put another way; I've found if you use enough big words and say enough clever things, people will treat you as if you're smart even on unrelated matters.
Yeah, feels, same.
More broadly there is a thread to pull there about the overwhelming power of narratives- in all forms, words, pictures, sounds- in human- only human- affairs.
Power in every other species on the planet is measured in physical and sometimes mental/tactical capabilities. Only in humans are stories dominant. Of course there is violence in the human world, but the most boldly violent devote the most care to their narratives.
Framing that state of affairs as dictatorship is a brilliant and ironic insight.
I went into the piece expecting more. Instead I got blather about bureaucracy.
Cheers.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
"an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong" That's an incredible way to frame place for people to live . You may find that aesthetically disgusting, that's your right, but I find the legally mandated suburbs of an expensive city to be morally disgusting given the impacts on the environment and poor people.
This isn't a discussion about housing availability. You should make a new submission about that if you want to go into that topic in depth. There are facets to this discussion that your post is glossing over; it's not a binary choice between HK style apartments or suburban sprawl.
I don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing. It's always used as a political weapon against housing. Someone's ability to have shelter always beats out the other person's subjective aesthetic tastes that they have no right to impose on anyone.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#24It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones. --------- As Marc Andreessen remarks, in every case, the culprit is regulation. Ho hum. And the 5 year old AEI chart that's been bumping around awhile. IIRC TVs are so low because they use a trick called 'hedonic averaging' where a 27…
>> What’s the most important change that happened in the world of atoms in the last 30 years? Uber may be near the top the list
Oh you mean a scheduling app that's lost billions of dollars via explicitly lawless business practices? Yes, it sure is no running water
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#25> Everywhere I look, I see the rise of talkocracy — others have called it the dictatorship of the articulate. Talkers standing in the way of builders; offering we ponder, analyze, investigate, research, dissect, agonize endlessly over plans before we lay a single brick. Ok, so how do technologically-minded folks learn to talk better than anyone else, to hack that system and make it work again? Is there a system for i…
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#26After playing around with GPT-3 a bit, I've started to suspect a lot of humans are actually very good at manipulating semantic sentences, without necessarily understanding their content.
It would explain why so many "smart" people will often speak long sentences that sound right, but have zero information content in them.
Maybe it's just not that hard to construct grammatically and semantically correct, but zero information gain sentences, paragraphs, speeches (as in, very hard, but much much easier than thinking new novel thoughts).
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a discussion about housing availability. You should make a new submission about that if you want to go into that topic in depth. There are facets to this discussion that your post is glossing over; it's not a binary choice between HK style apartments or suburban sprawl.
I don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing. It's always used as a political weapon against housing. Someone's ability to have shelter always beats out the other person's subjective aesthetic tastes that they have no right to impose on anyone.
I would suggest this speaks to the weight of your experiences coloring your view. It doesn't have to be this way, though, yours are just one set of lived experiences, and the systems you live in are not necessarily objectively the best ones.
The issue you're discussing is that aesthetic objections are being used as a hard roadblock to progress. This suggests that aesthetic input needs to be received without them being an opportunity to derail a project if the projects is passing all other measures it has been evaluated on. It could be said that such input should have achievable criteria for success/passability without being significantly at odds with the premise of the exercise.
Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it as this is a pressing and heated american issue, and it's clear that you feel strongly on the matter.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#28There is a deep irony in writing an over-worded essay that effectively says 'I don't like it when people outside my profession regulate my actions'. Keep It Simple, Stooge.
I definitely think that the wake left by crypto steaming by and then striking multiple successive icebergs demonstrates that regulation is crucial and that unregulated fields with potential profits very quickly become a hell dominated by huge corporations who start to dictate the terms of the field.
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#29After playing around with GPT-3 a bit, I've started to suspect a lot of humans are actually very good at manipulating semantic sentences, without necessarily understanding their content. It would explain why so many "smart" people will often speak long sentences that sound right, but have zero information content in them. Maybe it's just not that hard to construct grammatically and semantically correct, but zero info…
Are you describing the article? ;
Re: The dictatorship of the articulate
#30> It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.
Well. This is insinuating that more regulation reduced innovation. But it's confusing correlation with causation. The things that are the most regulated are also the ones with failure is more costly. So maybe _that_ is the reason why innovation is worse there.
Dictatorship of the articulate indeed.