Non-standard politics

NancyLebovitz

In the big survey, political views are divided into large categories so that statistics are possible. This article is an attempt to supply a text field so that we can get a little better view of the range of beliefs.

My political views aren't adequately expressed by "libertarian". I call myself a liberal-flavored libertarian, by which I mean that I want the government to hurt people less. The possibility that the government is giving too much to poor people is low on my list of concerns. I also believe that harm-causing processes should be shut down before support systems

So, what political beliefs do you have that don't match the usual meaning of your preferred label?

I put 'other' and wrote 'technocracy', by which I mean rule of experts/replacement of elections with standardised tests. And I don't mean that the country should be run by someone with an IQ of 180 and no social skills, the tests should also measure aspects such as ability to detect lies/lie, emotional control, credence calibration and so forth. The tests and criteria would also be non-uniform, so a foreign minister would require more social skills then the health minister.

I could go on, but suffice to say this should solve all the problems the NRx people identify with democracy, without putting all power in a single point of failure who is chose on the basis of being inbred.

I'd love to make a suggestion that your tests include a goal/empathy/altruism/duty test that ensures they're not in the office in order to simply enrich themselves through corruption.

0ShardPhoenix12y

Ideally I also support more testing for everything, but there's a difficulty in keeping more complex tests both accurate and non-corrupted. IQ tests should be fine for some things but probably not everything.

19Nornagest12y

Sounds like Imperial China's civil service exams, with emphasis on different skills. (The civil service exams focused on Chinese classics, which is probably a decent proxy for conscientiousness and intelligence but not so good at measuring social skills.) There's obviously something to be said for the system, since it lasted for better than a thousand years and weathered several dynastic changes. But plenty has also been written about its drawbacks, and the main ones seem to revolve around regulatory capture: empowering experts to rule also empowers them to decide the meaning of "expert", which we might expect to incrementally make a system less meritocratic and more aristocratic. Goodhart's law is also worth thinking about.