No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
How do you select the psychologist, social scientist, and team of economists that fill these roles?
Yeah, it's sort of a chicken before the egg problem - you need an expert to identify one. The potential for echo chambers is there.
In practice, though, wouldn't it be similar to how any other role is filled?
Here's one criterion: Outcomes. What is their track record? Have they made meaningful contributions that solve complex problems? I don't need an intimate knowledge of carpentry to see that a contractor's reviews have photos of great (or not so great) work.
The actual electoral process could be a variety of approaches, and all have their weaknesses, but most would be 'less wrong' than the current system.
Hardly any economist would agree with a tariff, yet here we are.
I don't have a stake in whether it's a nomination system by academic organizations, or some other minimum bar, or whether the process is still ultimately democratic, etc. One can theorycraft all kinds of technocratic electoral systems and their weaknesses, but I'm gonna need some convincing that any systems' flaws are worse than what we have now.
If we're talking about which forms of government are "better" than others, we need a benchmark of what makes one better or worse. I'm a big fan of the ideal stated in the US declaration of independence: governments exist to preserve the rights of their people, in the broadest possible sense.
A technocracy, where established experts make relevant rules, is probably the worst form of government that's still trying to be good. For whatever topic you have, the original paradigm becomes fiercely embedded, and because power wants to preserve itself that basic framework would be even worse than what we have now.
Imagine if a group of goldbug economists had been in charge of markets and banks when the great depression hit. Or if ma bell has been in charge of telecommunications when the Internet was invented. Or if the same GM engineers who killed the EV1 and bet on trucks were in charge when electric cars and hybrids started becoming popular.
Technocracies don't have a way to change perspectives. You get all the bad parts of a bureaucratic democratic Republic, and none of the way to short circuit bloody revolutions that makes democracies the least-bad option. You might as well just go back to monarchies -- at least for those, there was a person who could be almost impartial when it comes time to decide if old ways need to change.
I agree experts can be wrong and have been wrong many times throughout history.
I can also see the concerns for maintaining the status quo.
What I'm thinking of is a less extreme variant of technocracy, where academic organizations, think tanks, etc. nominate candidates according to their own criteria. That way the overall bar is raised while leaving the decision on who is 'qualified' decentralized among the public.
My issue isn't that goldbug economists are promoting harmful policies during a depression. Some issues are complex, and people are fallible.
My issue is that tariffs are widely agreed to be harmful, yet we have tariffs wrecking the economy now. Tariffs arguably constrain people's rights by reducing their freedom to purchase what they want at fair market prices.
Like, at the very least, we should be avoiding blatant mistakes that most experts agree on. The fact that we did, in fact, make a glaring mistake against the advice of basic economics means that something is broken with the system.
The American political system occasionally having a terrible choice is one of the tradeoffs for having power be changeable without bloodshed.
Because of lifetime appointments the US legal system is nearly a technocracy as you describe. It arrived at a decision in 1971 that a wide swath of the body politic was so opposed to that they essentially lost all faith the status quo. What followed was a decades long campaign to shift that pseudo-technocracy. Not a bloody insurrection.
You and I may disagree with their position, and we both dislike some of the results of their movement, but the worth of a government form is how well it responds to such discontent.
I don't think you'll get any disagreement that the current administration is exposing some flaws in the American political system. But the potential fixes for those flaws are numerous, while a brand new system as you propose would have its own expected and unexpected flaws.
Let's talk about those goldbugs, since anything else urges trolls to show up. If they're in power what stops them from declaring that their opponents are "fake" economists? How would we remove them from power?
There's multiple ways to achieve the goals of a technocracy.
I agree with your criticism, but you're criticizing a more extreme, centralized form of technocracy. I have criticisms of direct democracy, but I wouldn't conclude all democratic systems are bad because of the most extreme version.
And democracy and technocracy aren't mutually exclusive, either.
For the legal example, some states hold elections for their judges, and most require a law degree. This sets some minimum to be a judge in those areas, which is technocratic.
What if a judge claims other judges are fake? Well, the people can evaluate those claims and vote accordingly.
But at least you don't have some unhinged individual with no understanding of the law abusing their judicial powers.
I can't really speak to the bloodshed since I don't know which electoral process you're criticizing, but technocracies don't need bloodshed, no.
For your goldbug criticism, here's one potential example (out of many, many possible systems) that could resolve it: Academic and think tank organizations stake their reputation by nominating economists, and then the people vote on them.
Let's say the Mises Institute nominates a goldbug economist. I highly doubt enough people would vote for them vs all the other candidates by organizations like the American Economic Association, etc. And if they do get elected, whatever chaos that ensues would harm not only the candidate's reputation, but the Mises Institute's reputation. People would vote them out and ignore candidates from the Mises Institute.