Highlights from The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance by Simone Collins
Highlights from this book
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In a bureaucracy, there are no bad guys: Just hundreds of people acting in a self-interested fashion. Evil is rarely a choice—rather, it’s an emergent property of a set of rules.
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Progressives optimize for intragenerational quality of life and individual agency. Conservatives optimize for intergenerational cultural fitness and fidelity.
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The Urban Dispossessed: These are people who live online within contexts that rely on the infrastructure set up by the internet’s economic elite and moderated by the internet’s social elite: Redditors, Facebookers, Instagramers, etc. The Internet’s Rural Dispossessed: These are people who live in online contexts that do not rely on infrastructure set up by the internet’s economic elite and that are is not moderated: 4chan-ers, 8kun-ers, booru-ers. Just as in the real world it is very hard to “occupy” the territory of the rural dispossessed, as soon as one site belonging to the internet’s rural dispossessed is shut down, another springs up. Whereas the traditional social elite of the internet have no influence within these decentralized online communities, they effectively have almost total control of the narrative within the communities of the internet’s urban dispossessed.
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One way to mollify this risk is to remove “orders” from a system altogether. Capitalism, when contrasted with state-controlled economies, presents a great example of how this can be achieved, as capitalism creates a system in which individual governing units operate largely independently and based on emergent reward systems.
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The most interesting participants, however, take anonymity as an opportunity to gauge their ability to “dominate” the community by seeing how well their ideas spread organically, through their own merit (this is why so many memes that end up inundating other online communities like an invasive species come out of the memetic reactor represented by relatively small, anonymous online communities).
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This disease blocks the core purpose of consciousness: To serve as an internal memetic evolution engine that enables ideas to compete within our minds and only permits the most optimal ideas to survive.
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Institutionally, anything that grants kids a great childhood, pride in their culture, and a competitive edge in modern markets should be considered a priority.