100 times yes. I have held for a long time admiration to both Lee Kwan Yew and Atatürk for being a class of men that ia incredibly rare and hard to achieve.
They came, took their societies, cleaned and developped them and then left. And what I admire most about both of those are their insane pragmatism and devotion to the progress, and they did it because they had the most important value of them all, they cared, really and deeply about the results. That is what I crystallized from their leadership techniques, not the methods but the spirit of deeply caring about the outcome and doing whatever is needed in order to achieve, moving fast and breaking stuff or moving slowly and accomodating when the situation said so.
I think part of the difficulty of this is the traditional problem of power, people who want it the most are the ones who should have it the least. And I think the delusion of many men that if they were put in their position they would have achieved as much.
The only antidote to this seems to be to realize that you will be corrupted with power and that in order to avoid it you need to really care. And that being honest in the moral shortcomings is the first step towards the betterment as a leader.
"Half of your children will be taken from you and raised by a family selected randomly from a pool of families that sit in the middle of the distribution on basically every metric that we can measure. You'll be reunited with them when they're 30. Neither the child nor the family will know of their relation to you."
Totally crazy, yes, but it's the only idea I've ever had to really align the incentives of the ruling and the ruled. We sure as hell wouldn't have gone into Vietnam and Iraq if our presidents and senators had a chance in hell of their childrens' being drafted into the infantry.
> "Half of your children will be taken from you and raised by a family selected randomly
Woof - doesn't this get you the worst of both worlds? Maximal fertility crisis and brain drain (everyone desirable + able to emigrate does so they can have their own family), AND we're selecting even more for political psychopaths and the corrupt (because who is more likely to try to attain high office in this scenario? Smart + moral people who understand their limited ability to steer a big ship, or psychopaths who don't really care what happens to their kids, but are happy to have power / embezzle, etc?)
Totally agree we need "skin in the game" from high level politicians, though.
Unsurprisingly and completely on theme, Singapore is once again one of the only countries to do this well. About 60% of politician high level comp is fixed, with the rest coming from Annual Variable Components and National Bonuses tied to KPI's like GDP growth, unemployment, productivity growth, real income growth of the lowest quintile, and median income growth.
Of course in the US, the method is severely underpaying politicians, but allowing them to insider trade and / or achieve "rotating door" high level Board and advisor positions in various companies that rely heavily on government contracting, ensuring that we have the very best mix of aloof millionaires looking to game this "IQ and connection test" system. Look how well that's working. 😂
hah yeah you’re probably right. Even more extreme sociopath selection probably.
Reminds me of the thought experiment that we should implant nuclear launch codes into a presidential aide in such a way that they can only be accessed by killing the aid. Theory being that having to kill a real, breathing human being would be much harder than the abstraction of killing “100 million Russkies.” Of course, like my goofy idea, it only works if your leaders have some baseline degree of character. And if you can establish a baseline degree of character somehow, then just do that and select for people with really high character!
Man aligning skin in the game is truly a problem in society all around. Singapore does a lot of things well because the man who basically architected it put pragmatism over anything and everything. Also a testament to his character overall is that the man literally married 1 woman early on, connected with his heritage late in life and recommended all Chinese Singaporeans to learn Chinese and always mentioned his family as his greatest achievement, doesnt seem like he had any cheating scandals. This is historically, incredibly rare amongst noteworthy leaders.
Wow I seemed to miss your comment in my "touch grass" absence. I have a friend who is a weird communist and for whom the solution was this but society wide.
Also, my man, talking about Turks but this was basically the devishirme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme system where they collected a "blood tax" from Christian Slavic lands and eventually through the centuries it became a corrupt body of people. It aligns the incentives but only temporarily, until entropy comes and destroys it with its inherent and natural corruption.
I definitely agree with the "choose somebody really smart and moral who doesn't want to be leader" as a better selection mechanism than a literal "lying contest" aka election - but I worry that would literally be hell for Scott.
There's winners and losers in every decision, and every decision is relatively high stakes. It's pretty much the *worst* position to be in if you're moral and actually care about everybody to constantly be making decisions that screw some portion of the populace.
Much better to put somebody who's demostrated that they both like leading a country and are really good at it - it takes a very particular type of personality to have both of those traits unified in one person.
No. I like SA a lot, but one of the reasons I like his writing so much is that he's extremely open minded and amenable to persuasion. This is good in an open, constructive environment, but bad when people might be adversarially optimising to persuade SA.
Also he's actually pretty averse to conflict in person, if I'm remembering correctly.
100 times yes. I have held for a long time admiration to both Lee Kwan Yew and Atatürk for being a class of men that ia incredibly rare and hard to achieve.
They came, took their societies, cleaned and developped them and then left. And what I admire most about both of those are their insane pragmatism and devotion to the progress, and they did it because they had the most important value of them all, they cared, really and deeply about the results. That is what I crystallized from their leadership techniques, not the methods but the spirit of deeply caring about the outcome and doing whatever is needed in order to achieve, moving fast and breaking stuff or moving slowly and accomodating when the situation said so.
I think part of the difficulty of this is the traditional problem of power, people who want it the most are the ones who should have it the least. And I think the delusion of many men that if they were put in their position they would have achieved as much.
The only antidote to this seems to be to realize that you will be corrupted with power and that in order to avoid it you need to really care. And that being honest in the moral shortcomings is the first step towards the betterment as a leader.
"Half of your children will be taken from you and raised by a family selected randomly from a pool of families that sit in the middle of the distribution on basically every metric that we can measure. You'll be reunited with them when they're 30. Neither the child nor the family will know of their relation to you."
Totally crazy, yes, but it's the only idea I've ever had to really align the incentives of the ruling and the ruled. We sure as hell wouldn't have gone into Vietnam and Iraq if our presidents and senators had a chance in hell of their childrens' being drafted into the infantry.
> "Half of your children will be taken from you and raised by a family selected randomly
Woof - doesn't this get you the worst of both worlds? Maximal fertility crisis and brain drain (everyone desirable + able to emigrate does so they can have their own family), AND we're selecting even more for political psychopaths and the corrupt (because who is more likely to try to attain high office in this scenario? Smart + moral people who understand their limited ability to steer a big ship, or psychopaths who don't really care what happens to their kids, but are happy to have power / embezzle, etc?)
Totally agree we need "skin in the game" from high level politicians, though.
Unsurprisingly and completely on theme, Singapore is once again one of the only countries to do this well. About 60% of politician high level comp is fixed, with the rest coming from Annual Variable Components and National Bonuses tied to KPI's like GDP growth, unemployment, productivity growth, real income growth of the lowest quintile, and median income growth.
Of course in the US, the method is severely underpaying politicians, but allowing them to insider trade and / or achieve "rotating door" high level Board and advisor positions in various companies that rely heavily on government contracting, ensuring that we have the very best mix of aloof millionaires looking to game this "IQ and connection test" system. Look how well that's working. 😂
hah yeah you’re probably right. Even more extreme sociopath selection probably.
Reminds me of the thought experiment that we should implant nuclear launch codes into a presidential aide in such a way that they can only be accessed by killing the aid. Theory being that having to kill a real, breathing human being would be much harder than the abstraction of killing “100 million Russkies.” Of course, like my goofy idea, it only works if your leaders have some baseline degree of character. And if you can establish a baseline degree of character somehow, then just do that and select for people with really high character!
Man aligning skin in the game is truly a problem in society all around. Singapore does a lot of things well because the man who basically architected it put pragmatism over anything and everything. Also a testament to his character overall is that the man literally married 1 woman early on, connected with his heritage late in life and recommended all Chinese Singaporeans to learn Chinese and always mentioned his family as his greatest achievement, doesnt seem like he had any cheating scandals. This is historically, incredibly rare amongst noteworthy leaders.
Wow I seemed to miss your comment in my "touch grass" absence. I have a friend who is a weird communist and for whom the solution was this but society wide.
Also, my man, talking about Turks but this was basically the devishirme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme system where they collected a "blood tax" from Christian Slavic lands and eventually through the centuries it became a corrupt body of people. It aligns the incentives but only temporarily, until entropy comes and destroys it with its inherent and natural corruption.
I was extremely amused.
I'd prefer Scott Alexander as philosopher king. But maybe this is kinda a genius way to get around the variance problem of dictatorship.
I definitely agree with the "choose somebody really smart and moral who doesn't want to be leader" as a better selection mechanism than a literal "lying contest" aka election - but I worry that would literally be hell for Scott.
There's winners and losers in every decision, and every decision is relatively high stakes. It's pretty much the *worst* position to be in if you're moral and actually care about everybody to constantly be making decisions that screw some portion of the populace.
Much better to put somebody who's demostrated that they both like leading a country and are really good at it - it takes a very particular type of personality to have both of those traits unified in one person.
No. I like SA a lot, but one of the reasons I like his writing so much is that he's extremely open minded and amenable to persuasion. This is good in an open, constructive environment, but bad when people might be adversarially optimising to persuade SA.
Also he's actually pretty averse to conflict in person, if I'm remembering correctly.