#epistocracy

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ostromizing democracy

Friday (May 5), I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor for my novel Red Team Blues; and this weekend (May 6/7), I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

You know how “realist” has become a synonym for “asshole?” As in, “I’m not a racist, I’m just a ‘race realist?’” That same “realism” is also used to discredit the idea of democracy itself, among a group of self-styled “libertarian elitists,” who claim that social science proves that democracy doesn’t work — and can’t work.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

You’ve likely encountered elements of this ideology in the wild. Perhaps you’ve heard about how our cognitive biases make us incapable of deliberating, that “reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

Or maybe you’ve heard that voters are “rationally ignorant,” choosing not to become informed about politics because their vote doesn’t have enough influence to justify the cognitive expenditure of figuring out how to cast it.

There’s the “backfire effect,” the idea that rational argument doesn’t make us change our minds, but rather, drives us to double-down on our own cherished beliefs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s the Asch effect, which says that we will change our minds based on pressure from the majority, even if we know they’re wrong.

Finally, there’s the fact that the public Just Doesn’t Understand Economics. When you compare the views of the average person to the views of the average PhD economist, you find that the public sharply disagrees with such obvious truths as “we should only worry about how big the pie is, not how big my slice is?” These fools just can’t understand that an economy where their boss gets richer and they get poorer is a good economy, so long as it’s growing overall!

That’s why noted “realist” Peter Thiel thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Thiel says that mothers are apt to sideline the “science” of economics for the soppy, sentimental idea that children shouldn’t starve to death and thus vote for politicians who are willing to tax rich people. Thus do we find ourselves on the road to serfdom:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

Other realists go even further, suggesting that anyone who disagrees with orthodox (Chicago School) economists shouldn’t be allowed to vote: “[a]nyone who opposes surge pricing should be disenfranchised. That’s how we should decide who decides in epistocracy.”

Add it all up and you get the various “libertarian” cases for abolishing democracy. Some of these libertarian elitists want to replace democracy with markets, because “markets impose an effective ‘user fee’ for irrationality that is absent from democracy.

Others say we should limit voting to “Vulcans” who can pass a knowledge test about the views of neoclassical economists, and if this means that fewer Black people and women are eligible to vote because either condition is “negatively correlated” with familiarity with “politics,” then so mote be it. After all, these groups are “much more likely than others to be mistaken about what they really need”:

https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/03/the-demographic-argument-for-compulsory-voting-with-a-guest-appearance-by-the-real-reason-the-left-advocates-compulsory-voting/

These arguments and some of their most gaping errors are rehearsed in an excellent Democracy Journal article by Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier, and Melissa Schwartzberg (Mercier’s research is often misinterpreted and misquoted by libertarian elitists to bolster their position):

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/the-new-libertarian-elitists/

The article is a companion piece to a new academic article in American Political Science Review, where the authors propose a new subdiscipline of political science, Analytical Democracy Theory:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/analytical-democratic-theory-a-microfoundational-approach/739A9A928A99A47994E4585059B03398

What’s “Analytical Democracy Theory?” It’s the systematic study of when and how collective decision-making works, and when it goes wrong. Because the libertarian elitists aren’t completely, utterly wrong — there are times when groups of people make bad decisions. From that crumb of truth, the libertarian elitists theorize an entire nihilistic cake in which self-governance is impossible and where we fools and sentimentalists must be subjugated to the will of our intellectual betters, for our own good.

This isn’t the first time libertarian political scientists have pulled this trick. You’ve probably heard of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” which claims to be a “realist” account of what happens when people try to share something — a park, a beach, a forest — without anyone owning it. According to the “tragedy,” these commons are inevitably ruined by “rational” actors who know that if they don’t overgraze, pollute or despoil, someone else will, so they might as well get there first.

The Tragedy of the Commons feels right, and we’ve all experienced some version of it — the messy kitchen at your office or student house-share, the litter in the park, etc. But the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin in Science, was a hoax:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic — he claimed that the tragedy was inevitable, and, moreover, that every commons had experienced a tragedy. But Hardin made it all up. It wasn’t true. What’s more, Hardin — an ardent white nationalist — used his “realist’s account of the commons to justify colonization and genocide.

After all, if the people who lived in these colonized places didn’t have property rights to keep their commons from tragifying, then those commons were already doomed. The colonizers who seized their lands and murdered the people they found there were actually saving the colonized from their own tragedies.

Hardin went on to pioneer the idea of “lifeboat ethics,” a greased slide to mass-extermination of “inferior” people (Hardin was also a eugenicist) in order to save our planet from “overpopulation.”

Hardin’s flawed account of the commons is a sterling example of the problem with economism, the ideology that underpins neoclassical economics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Economism was summed up in by Ely Devons, who quipped “”If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Hardin asked himself, “If I were reliant upon a commons, what would I do?” And, being a realist (that is, an asshole), Hardin decided that he would steal everything from the commons because that’s what the other realists would do if he didn’t get there first.

Hardin didn’t go and look at a commons. But someone else did.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for her work studying the properties of successful, durable commons. She went and looked at commons:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

Ostom codified the circumstances, mechanisms and principles that distinguished successful commons from failed commons.

Analytical Democratic Theory proposes doing for democratic deliberation what Ostrom did for commons: to create an empirical account of the methods, arrangements, circumstances and systems that produce good group reasoning, and avoid the pitfalls that lead to bad group reasoning. The economists’ term for this is microfoundations: the close study of interaction among individuals, which then produces a “macro” account of how to structure whole societies.

Here are some examples of how microfoundations can answer some very big questions:

Backfire effects: The original backfire effect research was a fluke. It turns out that in most cases, people who are presented with well-sourced facts and good arguments change their minds — but not always.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-019-09528-x

Rational ignorance: Contrary to the predictions of “rational ignorance” theory, people who care about specific issues become “issue publics” who are incredibly knowledgeable about it, and deeply investigate and respond to candidates’ positions:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08913810608443650

Rational ignorance is a mirage, caused by giving people questionnaires about politics in general, rather than the politics that affects them directly and personally.

“Myside” bias: Even when people strongly identify with a group, they are capable of filtering out “erroneous messages” that come from that group if they get good, contradictory evidence:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237827

Majority bias: People are capable of rejecting the consensus of majorities, when the majority view is implausible, or when the majority is small, or when the majority is not perceived as benevolent. The Asch effect is “folklore”: yes, people may say that they hold a majority view when they face social sanction for rejecting it, but that doesn’t mean they’ve changed their minds:

https://alexandercoppock.com/guess_coppock_2020.pdf

Notwithstanding all this, democracy’s cheerleaders have some major gaps in the evidence to support their own view. Analytical Democratic Theory needs to investigate the nuts-and-bolts of when deliberation works and when it fails, including the tradeoffs between:

“social comfort and comfort in expressing dissent”:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/S0065-2601(05)37004-3

“shared common ground and some measure of preexisting disagreement”:

https://sci-hub.st/10.1037/0022-3514.91.6.1080

“group size and the need to represent diversity”:

https://www.nicolas.claidiere.fr/wp-content/uploads/DiscussionCrowds-Mercier-2021.pdf

“pressures for conformity and concerns for epistemic reputation”:

https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/30811

Realism is a demand dressed up as an observation. Realists like Margaret Thatcher insisted “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, but what she meant was “stop trying to think of an alternative.” Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic, he claimed that the tragedy of the commons was inevitable — that we shouldn’t even bother trying to create public goods.

The Ostrom method — actually studying how something works, rather than asking yourself how it would work if everyone thought like you — is a powerful tonic to this, but it’s not the only one. One of the things that makes science fiction so powerful is its ability to ask how a system would work under some different social arrangement.

It’s a radical proposition. Don’t just ask what the gadget does: ask who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s the foundation of Luddism, which is smeared as a technophobic rejection of technology, but which was only ever a social rejection of the specific economic arrangements of that technology. Specifically, the Luddites rejected the idea that machines should be “so easy a child could use them” in order to kidnap children from orphanages and working them to death at those machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory

There are sf writers who are making enormous strides in imagining how deliberative tools could enable new democratic institutions. Ruthanna Emrys’s stunning 2022 novel “A Half-Built Garden” is a tour-de-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

I like to think that I make a small contribution here, too. My next novel, “The Lost Cause,” is at root a tale of competing group decision-making methodologies, between post-Green New Deal repair collectives, seafaring anarcho-capitalist techno-solutionists, and terrorizing white nationalist militias (it’s out in November):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A lab-coated scientist amidst an array of chemistry equipment. His head has been replaced with a 19th-century anatomical lateral cross-section showing the inside of a bearded man's head, including one lobe of his brain. He is peering at a large flask half-full of red liquid. Inside the liquid floats the Capitol building.]

[philosophycorner]

A Hallmark Sophistic Tendency and More on Epistocracy

Sophism is when one reasons fallaciously in hopes of deceiving someone. In other words, it is when someone employs fallacious, yet convincing, reasoning to sway someone. In some cases, people with these tendencies will project by accusing their opponent of sophistry or they will employ a No True Scotsman in saying that their opponent cannot possible be a “real” philosopher. I do not take kindly to such ad hominem and that is why I discontinued the discussion. Some of you may have seen this in my opponent’s response yesterday. These issues are minor. The major issue is in how he defines words.

Sophists tend to define words by omitting the use their opponent is using. When I say voting rights infringe upon other more integral, unalienable rights like the right to life or healthcare, I am not at all talking about a negative right, as he defined, in where one can hypothetically defend their right using force. While this is a definition of a right, it is not the only definition on offer. A right is also a principle of entitlement, a positive right, and so, when I say someone has the right to life, what I am saying is that they are entitled to live, irrespective of what the Constitution says; the phrase right to life in The Declaration of Independence is described as unalienable, god-given if you prefer. While there are clauses attached to this entitlement, such as they are entitled to live given that they do not murder someone, my definition is just as valid as the one my opponent employed. The difference is that my opponent dismissed my definition in order to deceive his readers. That is to say nothing of the validity of the distinction of negative and positive rights; plenty of philosophers (e.g. Eric Nelson, Ian Carter, Henry Shue) do not think the distinction is valid or even necessary.

He, for instance, continued to accuse me of not knowing what rights are, as though definitions themselves do not describe words in a self-evident fashion. A right is sometimes synonymous with a certain entitlement, but not all entitlements, real or imagined, are rights. A man may feel that after dating his girlfriend for five years, he is entitled to have sex with her. Consent is still at play no matter how long a couple has dated and so, he is not entitled to have sex with his girlfriend; she is not entitled to sex with her boyfriend either. These are matters of consent and as such, it is a privilege that they grant one another. The right to life is self-evident as even the Declaration of Independence attests. I do not need to go any further on that.

In that same vein, he mentions consent of the governed and people providing healthcare and bizarrely asserts that taxation is a violation of bodily autonomy; he does nothing at all to ground this claim, but, ironically enough, begs the question. Under the current government, 100 million or so people forgo their voting rights every election and many more forgo their rights as it pertains to electing state and local officials on a year-to-year basis. This implies that the right to vote is not as integral as some argue and definitely not as integral as my right to life. I may willingly surrender my right to vote given that I’m not particularly drawn to any of the candidates; I will not willingly surrender my right to live, assuming I am not terminally ill or mentally incapacitated. I am entitled to live and that is an integral entitlement; I am also entitled to vote, but that is not an integral entitlement as I can willingly choose not to.

What I have proposed, as Plato and others before me have, is an Epistocracy. Also of note is that he flat-out asserts Plato was wrong without justifying it; that is more more evidence that he has presupposed his conclusions. It is not a soft tyranny as he claimed. It is rule of the knowledgeable. What I am basically arguing is that if a third of the population is not going to vote anyway, we should decide on which one-third that is. The one-third that I temporally want to exclude are the least informed and that is assuming that such people even comprise one-third of the population; they might comprise a smaller portion than one-third and as such, I can say that at least I am not excluding as many people as are currently excluded and who have been excluded, at times, with malicious intent. The least informed are individuals who have not learned to or do not care to think critically. Since they do not think critically, they are prone to ignoring crucial issues and engaging in cult-like, conspiracy-based reasoning. A White Supremacist, on paper, is entitled to vote, but since he votes to harm minorities, he should not retain that entitlement.

Felons are largely excluded from the political process because they surrendered that entitlement in breaking the law. So it is up to my hypothetical government to decide at which point someone has committed to all that is required prior to breaking the law. What separates the average White Supremacist from Kyle Rittenhouse? The question boils down to who is armed and who is not and who is willing to harm or murder minorities versus who is not. Who then is the ideologue and who is willing to act on erred convictions? Since there is no sound reasoning to justify racism, discrimination, and prejudice, then White Supremacists should not be entitled to vote. Since there is no way of predicting which White Supremacist will act on their erred convictions, they should not be entitled to vote. Full stop!

The consent of the governed does not reduce to mere voting rights. In being a citizen or legal immigrant in the United States, you have de facto consented to be governed whether you vote or not, whether you are entitled to vote or not. Our current government already excludes a large portion of the population due to criminal records, gerrymandering, and other forms of voter suppression. So there is no material difference in my saying that we should exclude certain people for reasons separate from the ones the government uses to justify their exclusion and disenfranchisement of certain voters. As I have shown, however, I think my reasons for excluding the woefully ignorant are far better than the reasons given to exclude an entire demographic in a certain district or most felons without distinction. The primary reason is that voting rights cannot be prioritized over unalienable rights, so if a person votes with the intent to harm minorities, the minority’s right to live supersedes the White Supremacist’s right to vote. If I have to ground an entire moral framework to prove that conclusion, then my opponent is basically arguing that the right to life is not unalienable and is therefore, a privilege reserved for some and not others.

All felons are not created equal. Sure, a murderer on death row has long surrendered his entitlement to vote. Someone wrongfully accused of a crime or someone serving a marijuana-related sentence should not be excluded. Yet, in most cases, no distinction is made between the former felon and the latter. Then there is the real crux: my exclusion is not permanent. You can be a White Supremacist today and not be one tomorrow. That means that you can learn why you are wrong about non-Whites and come to see common humanity in minorities. Any and all kinds of ignorance can be rectified given time, so it is entirely possible to justify a vote for any candidate in an informed manner. What my hypothetical government would guarantee is an informed voter who does not vote along party lines, who does not double-down on a quasi-fascist like Trump, who does not ignore science and the urgency of Climate Change, and so on. A more informed electorate is absolutely a good thing and the exclusion stemming from my hypothetical government is preferable to the extant exclusion in the current U.S. government. 

In any case, this is why I refused to exchange further. Sophists define words by omitting definitions they dislike. They accuse, commit fallacies, and project their errors onto you. Ultimately, sophists tend to be disingenuous because they have predilections and surmises they think are self-evident and so they do not commit to the philosophical work of reasoning to their conclusion; this was observed in my opponent’s bizarre claim that taxation violates bodily autonomy and that the provision of healthcare, in where one is paid by the government, is also a violation of bodily autonomy. These conclusions are not argued for or justified in any way and entirely ignore state-provided healthcare in other countries in where people have consented to pay their taxes for sake of receiving free healthcare and tuition-free college educations. 

I have reasoned to my conclusion. I have seen the real harm in letting ignorant people vote year after year; these people have been given no (dis)incentive to rectify that ignorance. So basically what I am saying is that if we disincentivize ignorance, people will want to become more informed. They would not call every disagreeable story about their favored candidate “fake news.” They would not go down the rabbit-hole of conspiracy theories. They would have good reason to change. I see nothing at all wrong with telling people this: if you want to vote, demonstrate that you are informed enough and empathetic enough to participate in this process because your vote has palpable effects on other lives. After nearly four years of suffering through the lack of empathy, apathy, hatred, and incompetence of the Trump Administration, I am more resolute now than I was two years ago: everyone should not be entitled to vote; only the demonstrably informed in the U.S. population should do so and as such, I propose Epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable as that incentivizes everyone to become more knowledgeable before casting a vote. 

I will conclude by saying that the false equivalence he made between Epistocracy and tyranny can be dismissed very easily: Epistocracy does not permanently exclude anyone, so if anyone has an issue with being governed by the knowledgeable, then it is incumbent on them to demonstrate the aptitude to join the ranks of the knowledgeable; tyranny, on the other hand, excludes the governed and subjects them to any number of abuses. Epistocracy is not about abuse, but rather about preventing the abuse suffered by the more empathetic and knowledgeable at the hands of the cruel, apathetic, and ignorant. Perhaps we should want to exclude malignant Psychopaths, Narcissists, Sadists, and Machiavellians, most especially when they have dehumanizing and degrading views of people they do not agree with. This is beyond, “I do not like your voice” or “I do not like these people.” This is about people who speak harm and carry out actions consistent with dangerous and potentially fatal beliefs. 

The United States cannot continue to tolerate such ignorance and it is clear that the entitlement to vote has fallen into the wrong hands. In the least, I can say what a lot of other people cannot say: I have proposed a viable solution. I also happen to think it is among the better solutions, especially in light of my opponent’s tacit anarchism and admiration for Capitalism. I will not challenge a sophist on such erred points of view, as they have already presupposed the conclusion; this is also painfully obvious in his ego-stroking as it pertains to Marxism. He has claimed to debase all of Marxism and this should not surprise anyone given that my opponent’s love for Capitalism entails feeling threatened by an anti-Capitalist like Marx. There is no argument to be had with such people. In any event, be mindful of the tendency to define words by omitting key definitions. Such an individual does not want a genuine dialogue; they just want to win. Nothing productive comes from that.

[ohagios]

The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

[sovietorphan-archive]

starter for King Asshole™. 

@epistocracy

tip toes stood on the chair as jack tried to reach the box in the pantry, one arm stretching up whilst the other gripped onto the plastic cereal bowl. his third attempt was again not successful. being the first one awake had its advantages but equal disadvantages. or at least jack thought he was the first one awake. when he saw mark round the corner to enter the kitchen he couldn’t help but sigh in defeat, knowing his morning cartoons would be switched to some sort of news channel in a matter of minutes. right now though, his only thoughts were of getting to eat his lucky charms that he couldn’t reach. even if it meant having to talk to Mark. “ ---I can’t reach the cereal. ”

[fondofbirds-moved-blog]

@epistocracy from x :

❝ ..... really ?? ❞

[rcsethcrn-archive-blog]

AND I’VE LIVED SO MUCH LIFE

                               I THINK THAT GOD IS GONNA HAVE TO KILL ME   T W I C E

@epistocracy

[philosophycorner]

I agree with you on most of those issues but also youre basically just saying everyone who has different opinions than you doesnt deserve an opinion- at that point why dont we just make you dictator ?

It’s not mere difference of opinion, is it? We are talking about a vote that affects other people. Some votes literally get people killed. Others simply don’t. You are making a new false equivalence: espistocracy and autocracy are the same because now one informed voter is a dictator. Here’s the issue: I am not the only informed voter. There are millions more and whether through aptitude tests or other means, you can be part of that informed electorate; who or what is stopping you? So I am not silencing your opinion. I am ensuring that less informed opinions have no power to hurt others. You can continue to have political opinions and use them as basis to vote insofar as you are informed on all pertinent issues. That you’re voting for a pro-gun candidate because you swear up and down that his opponent wants to strike down the Second Amendent will not cut it. That you, as a Christian, want to vote based on the fact that you think one candidate is coming after your religious freedom in merely recognizing that Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, etc. also have religious freedom will not cut it. If you are going to make such an outlandish claim about any candidate, you will have to argue, using evidence, that this is the case. You cannot continue to proceed in such an uninformed fashion because doing so, as history has proven time and again, harms and kills others.

So no, I am no dictator — unless you want to conclude that millions of other Americans are not informed. A lot of voters are informed. I would dare say close to 50% of voters on either side are informed; this is how we get Republicans against Trump and committed to voting for the other party’s candidate. Republicans who have arrived at that conclusion have been led by facts rather than conspiracy theories, baseless opinions, and party loyalty. An epistocracy would account for voters on both sides of the aisle and voters emerging from up and coming parties like Democratic Socialists and Libertarians. I think humanity has benefited from education and informedness. The US can benefit from that as well. Again, 100 million people did not vote in 2016. No one forgoes an integral right. It’s like arguing that a Black man would willingly allow himself to get killed by police. Minorities do not willingly surrender their lives the same way some voters surrender their right to vote. So if only two-thirds of the country participates in the process, why not make it the most educated and informed among us rather than buffoons who want to see Kamala Harris’ birth certificate, give credence to Q-Anon, deny science and climate change, and think Biden is going to take people’s guns away? Epistocracy is not autocracy. It is the rule of knowledgeable; anyone can be knowledgeable. The problem in this country is that it has given credence to, if I can be frank, bullshit.

[consultingsister-arc]

STARTER FOR -- @epistocracy

  Here’s how her morning had gone so far; a run; a shower; company car picked her up; breakfast meeting with the online editor; some phone calls and then it all comes to a crashing halt when she suddenly, and without meaning to, throws up in her office bin. Not on schedule, not part of the plan!! She has one of those movie moments when her assistant says something like ‘hope it’s not morning sickness’ before Cee has cancelled all meetings, and is in a can heading towards Mark’s office, only stopping at a pharmacy. Well, she stops at the desk of Mark’s assistant too, smiling as she makes the odd request that her husband could be, discreetly, pulled out of his meeting make his way to the ladies bathroom. I m m e d i a t e l y.      So that’s where you’ll find her, doing what Celia does best; pacing. She snaps at anyone but Mark to get out, and at Mark to get in. “What the bloody hell took you so long?!” The editor whispers, pulling him into the bathroom. “It’s been two minutes so--” she points into the stall. "I was sick this morning!” 

[bbcmary-arc-blog]

starter call. –– @epistocracy

     “You’re a bit of a tool. Not even just your personality. That sweater just screams tool.”

[embittvred-a-blog]

( BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED STARTER CALL // @epistocracy )

                               ❝  I find it difficult to COMPREHEND Cee saying yes to your proposal ; perhaps even more so at you PROPOSING in the first place - you always told me you weren’t the marrying type. ❞

[rcsethcrn-archive-blog]

Send me a ● to hold my muse’s hand

AFFECTION MEMES | @epistocracy

The evening had been much like any other for the affluent and–more often that not–pretentious elite of London. Hundreds of bottles of champagne had been opened and depleted, leaving many of the attendees slurring their flowery words, and checkbooks had been opened in the names of charity, goodwill, or whatever reason was chosen to be stamped on the invitations. 

Yet, this night would stand out among the rest and she was certain her companion for the evening was the reason for it. They had not arrived together but as the evening progressed, she found herself wishing that they had. As it was, he had rescued her several times from less-than-engaging conversation, asking either for a word of his own or to invite her onto the dance floor. Of dancing and conversing both he was particularly skilled, his sharp wit seeming as effortless as each graceful dance and–unlike her husband-to-be–he seemed to have eyes only for her. She was used to be watched, to feel eyes upon her, but it had been far too long since she had found herself watching in return. 

As the evening drew to a close, Margaery found herself once again in his company. She wondered briefly if any of the other guests had noticed how they seemed to gravitate towards each other but she pushed the thought away as he flashed her the very smile that had initially caught her attention. Gods, it was a sight to behold, even that simple act of smiling. Yet, there was something behind it, behind his eyes, that promised of something more than the courtesy and light conversation. It left her curious and wanting. 

She said her goodbyes to him and prepared herself to begin the search for her fiance and brother when he reached across the small distance between them to take her hand. He held it there for just a moment to long and she wondered if he meant to pull her in closer. There was a glint of mischief in his eyes and more than a hint of a smirk on his face as he brought her hand up to kiss it–and directly on her engagement ring no less. He said nothing else, only gave her hand the slightest squeeze before letting it slip from his fingers and walking away. She watched him go, bemused but no less pleased for it. They would see each other again, she knew, but when she could not say. 

Soon. Let it be soon.

[bimboficationblues]

(1) i'm a philosophy major and have noticed analytics are obsessed with appeal to authority/expertise. if you want to see how cartoonish it gets look at michael huemer's paper "Is critical thinking epistemically responsible?" where he seems to want every non-expert to be an intellectually vacuous shell of a human being that can only read surveys of expert opinions and spout the numbers at people. it reminds me of jason brennan's epistocracy and, like brennan (and caplan), huemer is a libertarian

(2) so that leads me to conclude libertarians are attracted to this for some reason, although i think it's a trend with liberal (analytic) philosophy in general. basically i'm wondering if you know of any texts that explain and/or critique this phenomenon

I think if you look to like critiques of John Stuart Mill: Boy Genius, or similar figures, you will kind of start to see that this is a trend within liberal thought more broadly. The concept of the "genius" or the "expert" is historically correlated with the developing concept of the industrialist or the entrepreneur, and liberal thought has a deeply anti-democratic streak embedded within it. So like of course the libertarians still uphold it, because as the last bastions of Original Liberalism, their first value above all else is the preservation of private property (which is also what makes them so vulnerable to fascist creep)

Personally I really like Ishay Landa's book The Apprentice's Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism. It has its issues but it's actually fun to read and hones in on this strain of liberal thought quite nicely. I think reading up on Hayek or folks like that can also be pretty illustrative. These two papers (1) and (2), I found compelling when I read them.

What I like about this approach is that honing in on the sort of political climate and economic commitments of liberals/libertarians better helps explain their positions. I mean on a personal level, these people are arrogant dirtbags, you'll rarely find an epistocrat who says "I'm an absolute dunce, take away my right to vote" but I think it helps to place that worldview in economic context wherein they associate technical knowledge with economic power

[cicerobussytransplant]

sometimes people reinvent epistocracy but with the added twist thats its the rule of the scientists; namely my former classmate wants for tesla to be our king. literally

and ykw this man might have had a flirt with a pidgeon but maybe it could have been fun

[consultingsister-arc]

’ Shhh… sh.. don’t cry. ’

LAST WORD MEME-- @epistocracy

It’s just been one of those days, you know? Where, not only is everything going wrong, but it’s going wrong at a hundred miles an hour and there is nothing you can do but stand there and take it. Frustrated, tired and upset, she had then got into an argument with Ambrosia over something stupid and forgettable. Dropping her dinner on the floor was sort of the last straw. He would probably think she was crazy; bursting into tears over spilt microwave noodles, but she was very glad of the hug all the same. Cee makes no attempt to stop the flow, instead she just buries her face into his shoulder and sobs harder, letting the day crash over her in the safety of her own kitchen, and in the arms of her husband, who doesn’t have to understand to comfort her. 

[philosophycorner]

This explains why remedialaction, who I blocked, was blog stalking and so upset about my view on Epistocracy. He and his couple followers are Trump supporters and White Supremacists. He felt exposed and was upset and went on several diatribes to defend his ignorance. These are precisely the people that should not be voting, precisely the people that are truly dangerous — right down to repeating the nonsense that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. I will never feel guilt for recommending that people like this be silenced. I will block them all because their hatred does not warrant a platform.

[embittvred-a-blog]

@epistocracy ( moose & ginny )