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You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
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Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "exper…
Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
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No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.
But people do not value hierarchy for its own sake. They value hierarchy when they're on top of it, or at least in the top half. There are not actually fundamentally different values, but different interests.
People even relatively far down may believe The Hierarchy offers predictability and stability—even if I think their belief is incorrect.
Authoritarians tend to be fearful, and it offers a partial answer to those fears.
This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives. I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
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Is that a trope?
Yes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work...
The thing is, no one knows what medieval peasants were doing, cos we weren't there. We have this or that piece of evidence, but evidence can be misinterpreted.
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I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world. (Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)
That's an oddly specific thing to point out
This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.
You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives. I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity. I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics. There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found u…
I can recommend reading ACOUP to any technically minded person even if it's about history. I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics. He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth f…