this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
0 points (50.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

38859 readers
1006 users here now

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!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Genuine question. It seems like a topic that isn't discussed in-depth often anywhere I can find online.

To be clear, I'm talking about technocracy as in policies are driven by those with the relevant skills (instead of popularity, skills in campaigning, etc.).

So no, I don't necessarily want a mechanical engineer for president. I do want a team of economists to not tank the economy with tariffs, though.

And I do want a social scientist to have a hand in evaluating policy ideas by experts. A psychologist might have novel insights into how to improve educational policy, but the social scientist would help with the execution side so it doesn't flop or go off the rails.

The more I look at successful organizations like J-PAL, which trains government personnel how to conduct randomized controlled trials on programs (among other things), the more it seems like we should at least have government officials who have some evidence base and sound reasoning for their policies. J-PAL is the reason why several governments scaled back pilots that didn't work and instead allocated funds to scale programs that did work.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I think a technocracy would initially be relatively better, but would rapidly decline and likely end up worse.

Initially, there would be some significant number of genuinely sincere people who would be well-positioned to move into tge positions of power, and the requirement of technical expertisecwould eliminateca lot of the scumbags.

Over time though, the scumbags would figure out which hoops they needed to jump through in order to qualify for office, then they'd start co-opting that system, so that eventually, well-connected scumbags would, if anything, actually have an easier time of obtaining the necessary credentials than actual experts would.

I have no proposal for a non-hierarchical system because that's the exact sort of collective thinking that leads to hierarchical systems.

A non-hierarchical system can't be implemented. Rather it can only be the result ofvall the paticipants in a ststem (or vlosecenough as makes no meaningful difference) butting out of each other's decisions.

At that point, it will and can only take whatever form it takes - whatever might the manifestation of the unconstrained decisions of all of the participants.

This is a really good response. Thank you.

I think we can have both the benefits of democracy being decentralized and resistant to systemic manipulation, and of technocracy having some minimum bar to deter ignorant individuals from harming society. There are trade-offs for sure, but currently, we the people ultimately voted for someone who openly said he'd impose tariffs (among other things).

One potential example (among many, many possibilities) is a system where academic organizations and think tanks stake their reputation to nominate candidates, and then the people vote on them.

For example, let's say the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) nominates a pro-tariff candidate to manage economic policy. And then let's say the people end up voting for them. After the tariffs wreck the economy, the reputation of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) will deteriorate considerably. In the next election, the people will vote the candidate out and ignore future EPI nominations.