Dan Williams on Democracy and Technocracy

how to choose between them?

Dan Williams writes,

giving everyone an equal say in politics runs up against the obvious problem that people are highly unequal in their virtues and abilities. Political equality ensures that collective decision-making will be hampered by the input of citizens who are ignorant, irrational, selfish, or callous. It seems evident within other organisations that effective decision-making depends on allocating influence according to merit and competence, not assuming that everyone’s input is equally valuable. Why would the political organisation of society be any different?

This sounds like an argument for Curtis Yarvin’s position in our hypothetical debate.

But Williams sees no solution. In a subsequent post, he writes,

Whether we're ordinary voters or credentialed experts, there is always a profound gap between complex realities and our simplified and distorted understanding of them. Neither Lippmann nor Dewey had particularly satisfying proposals about which institutions and practices are most consistent with such epistemic limitations. Nevertheless, they both saw—correctly—that they pose one of the most profound political challenges we confront in the modern world.

I think that it will help to keep two questions separate:

1. What is the political arrangement that will lead to the wisest decisions?

2. What is the political arrangement that best allocates political power?

I think that Yarvin and Williams are implicitly focused on (1). I am focused on (2).

If you focus on the political arrangement that will lead to the best decisions in a complicated world, it is hard to see how pure democracy can be the answer. The typical citizen does not have the time to study each issue, compare the views of various experts, and vote in an informed way on individual laws and regulations.

What we have in practice is a democratic system for electing politicians, who in turn defer to experts, in some cases for advice and in other cases for the experts to make the decisions themselves. For Williams, this system is corrupted when experts try to control the information that flows to the voters.

rather than participating in the public sphere as any other democratic citizen would, experts can attempt to regulate it. For example, rather than simply telling citizens their views and hoping they will listen, they can implement policies to increase the visibility and perceived credibility of expert knowledge.

This strategy can take many forms, including censorship of “misinformation”

…although I have tried to highlight the attractions of technocratic regulation of the public sphere, it is ultimately a bizarre way of attempting to influence political outcomes. For one thing, it is such an indirect, roundabout strategy that it is difficult to see how it could ever be successful. And in fact, I think it’s very difficult to look at the vast amount of energy invested into this strategy in recent years and judge that it has “worked”.

The interventions to try to control the flow of information reaching voters include fact-checking as well as influencing social media outlets to enhance the visibility of some content while reducing the visibility of other content, or even “canceling” disfavored content providers altogether. The effect of those interventions on policy outcomes is at best unclear. But they certainly have provoked resentment.

The American Constitution

In the original American Constitution, popular elections played a much smaller role. Senators were chosen by state legislatures. The Presidency was expected to be contested in the electoral college, and the founders thought that frequently it would be deadlocked there and settled in the House of Representatives. They did not foresee politicians getting on the ballot by means of winning popular primaries.

Had the original vision held up, it is likely that the issue of controlling information available to voters would not have as much salience. The political elite would today be more insulated institutionally from mass opinion. As it is, they are insulated culturally from mass opinion, but they are exposed institutionally, as November’s election demonstrated. Given the cultural insulation, the institutional exposure is not a bad thing.

Institutions and Power

I want to shift the focus toward the second question, which concerns power. Let us not think of political institutions in terms of how well they convert individual opinions into decisions. Instead, let us think of political institutions in terms of how they resolve the contest for power, a contest which I take as inevitable, given human nature.

On the issue of power, I think that the desirable objectives of institutions are:

• Power is transferred peacefully.

• It is easier to attain a position of power if you do not have dark triad traits¹ than if you do have them.

• There is minimal incentive to concentrate power. Individual liberty and local decision-making authority are preserved.

American democracy has done well at maintaining peaceful transfer of power. In terms of the other two objectives, the performance of our institutions leaves a lot to be desired.

The Presidency, and to some extent the top positions in the bureaucracy, have attracted people with dark triad traits. Within my lifetime, the only President that I can recall who was not excessively cold, self-absorbed, and manipulative was the elder George Bush, who the voters cast aside in order to elect Bill Clinton. Clinton and his successors have been very high in dark triad traits.

The concentration of power in Washington has proceeded in a seemingly unstoppable manner, the Constitution notwithstanding. State and local governments have lost authority. And households have lost liberty.

Conclusion

On the narrow issue of whether to try to control information flows, I agree with Williams that strong control is undesirable. Interventions in media are not helpful.

Stepping back to the broader issue, I would say that our political institutions neither do a good job of solving the problem of putting decisions in the hands of the best experts nor of solving the problem of constraining the dangers of concentrated political power.

I can imagine that many institutional reforms that are intended to improve the decision-making process could worsen the power concentration problem. This might be true of my COO/CA suggestion, for example.

I would recommend instead trying to think about how to reverse the tendency toward attracting people with dark triad traits to positions of power, as well as the tendency toward concentration of power. Trying to fix our political institutions in order to improve the decision-making process may be focusing on the wrong problem. And trying to regulate information flows is focusing on the wrong solution.

substacks referenced above: @

Citizens, experts, and democracy

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The world outside and the pictures in our heads

1. The theory of the dark triad recognizes specific characteristics associated with each personality trait. Thus, Machiavellianism is marked by a tendency toward manipulative behaviour, narcissism by excessive self-importance and grandiosity, and psychopathy by callousness, impulsiveness, and thrill seeking. Although narcissism and psychopathy can occur at extreme pathological levels that disrupt a person’s ability to live a normal life, in the dark triad they exist at a lower, subclinical level