Techno-Puritanism / The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI

TPG 36.3 · 3,594 words · 16 min read · Structuring How We Think About Governance

Important Governing Features

While all government units can be described in terms of their decider and selector components, the units’ interaction with other units, information flows, and several other factors significantly influence outcomes and warrant careful consideration.

Interaction With Other Units

The rules for interaction between subordinate governing structures and other governing unitssignificantly influence the nature of the governance that emerges. Whether or not new governing structures can be formed within an existing one—and the process for forming those structures—significantly shapes the efficiency of a governing structure and the daily lives of those living within it.

Let’s explore a few examples. A group of individuals is largely free to come together and form a company or club when living under the U.S. governance system. This makes it radically different from more draconian systems, which prevent private gatherings or the formation of sub-governance systems like companies. Similarly, many companies might attempt to prevent their employees from coming together to form a union—a sub-governance system within the company.

When totalitarian governments do not wipe out churches, they typically draw church governance into their internal body of governance, converting the church into a fully integrated module within its governing structure to prevent the development of independent governance bodies that may undermine their authority. A similar dynamic can be observed among anti-union companies that incorporate elements of a union into their HR systems. In both cases, the internally-controlled organizations are meant to sufficiently address demands that would otherwise give birth to threatening external organizations.

When exploring a governing body, ask:

It is possible to be loose on one of these metrics yet strict on the other. Contrast the government-religion relations of the present United States of America with those of Medieval Europe. In the U.S., religions are free to form with almost no restrictions, while there are limits to the power a religious institution can yield. While one could not start new religions in Medieval Europe, church institutions were so powerful that clergy members were tried for crimes by separate ecclesiastical courts (troublingly, university students counted as clergy and frequently abused this lighter court structure).

The above case demonstrates what is known as “polycentric law.” Polycentric law describes a situation in which multiple legal systems overlap in a single jurisdiction. This was historically most relevant when ecclesiastic law overlapped with regional law or the law that applied to Roman citizens overlapped with regional law, but in the future it will be important with regard to how law is applied to online communities and moderation.

An interesting related point is the question of whether or not an individual subject to polycentric law can hold a position within a government’s decider module. Often it will be argued that the person has “foreign loyalty” and will not make decisions solely in the best interests of that particular governing structure.

Concerns over a person having loyalty to a foreign governing body have historically been used to bar Catholics from public office. This was even considered in the U.S. when John F. Kennedy first ran for office. In these cases, fear of conflicting loyalties typically (to our knowledge) turned out to be benign.

There are, however, exceptions. Consider President Park Geun-hye of South Korea, who capitulated to the desires of a cult, the Church of Eternal Life, while holding office. In this instance, an organization that was supposed to be subordinate to its ruling government unit (in that this cult was entirely contained within South Korea) found itself capable of controlling the unit above it.

Consider this question in terms of governing structures and how they nest within each other.

For example:

Also consider how sub-governing units of different types can interact, as is the case with public-private partnerships in which a private company partners with a nonprofit entity.

The factors at play are (A) any limits to power imposed on the sub-governing structures and (B) rules for forming and maintaining a sub-governing structure:

  1. Does it need to pay a fee or portion of its income to exist?
  2. Can it be imported from another area? (For example, can a foreign religion enter your country?)
  3. Does it require permission to exist or can it form without obtaining permission?
  4. Can it be subject to a governing body contained within a foreign government (like the Catholic church or a company with a headquarters in another country)?
  5. Can anyone run it?
  6. Can it have its own courts? If so, how powerful can they be?

For an exploration of how controlling the manner in which information moves around a governing system affects its behavior, see: Information Flow on page 367 of the Appendix.

Big Brother, Little Brother, and Phantom Brother

When it comes to information flow, unrestricted state or corporate government use of personal data—such as private conversations—is often a concern. The presence of cameras that may or may not be recording citizens for review by the state or a corporation are certain to change behavior. Every company with remote workers must wrestle with whether or not to demand unfettered access to their computers’ video cameras to ensure employees are actually working.[[67]](#_ftn67)

If you’re afraid of a Big-Brother-style governance structure spying on you, you should be downright terrified of Little Brother. We live in a world in which anyone could make freeware for a phone that passively monitors what is being said in a room, starts recording after recognizing a certain series of words, and uploads what has been recorded to a collective dataset (similar to those found on places like 8chan).

Parents might download apps to their kids’ phones or laptops that listen for when a teacher uses politically sensitive terms and record the following ten minutes. Groups may conceal old phones under seats in spaces where high-profile figures mix to listen for offenses they can subsequently publicize. Religious extremists may leave phones recording video in well-known gay establishments and subsequently upload the data to a collective database where clips are automatically run through facial processing software.

How governance structures handle the threat of Little Brother will be a defining aspect of their future operations.

In addition to Big Brother and Little Brother, we have Phantom Brother. While Big and Little Brother cause behavioral change as a product of possible monitoring, Phantom Brother causes behavioral change not through surveillance but rather by creating the “aesthetic of monitoring.” For example, if a pair of eyes is painted on a donation box, experiments have shown that individuals will donate significantly more money.[[68]](#_ftn68) We have not seen governance structures extensively use these systems yet and even we have hesitated to put them into practice in our own companies.

Success Metrics

Filters that determine who is given power, like the Chinese Imperial Exams and the actions of the Khmer Rouge, affect the governing structures those people enter. The metrics used to determine whether someone may move up within a governing unit’s hierarchy have a similarly profound effect.

Two examples of system failures resulting from mechanisms for promotion demonstrate different ways this effect can cause a system to fail: Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the current system of academia.

The Case of Mao’s Great Leap Forward

During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, governors were rewarded with advancement based on specific production metrics that were determined by the output of other governors. This system encouraged governors to inflate their output, which in turn created unrealistic expectations for other governors, ultimately forcing all players to inflate their numbers. Ultimately those more willing to lie, rather than those who were effective, rose in rank, and China’s central authority was forced to make decisions based on increasingly bad information.

Starvation became so common that a cultural tradition arose in which families would swap children so parents wouldn’t have to eat their own to survive. By some metrics, more people died during just this five year period than during the entirety of the American Slave Trade. We flag this as many people hear the word “inefficiency” and have trouble imagining the scale of suffering and death that can result.

We often ascribe “evil” that results from malice as somehow being worse than that which results from incompetence and disinterest, but when you are trading your infant with that of another family to avoid the added emotional pain of your family eating one of their own, I doubt it matters to you how you ended up in that position—only that you did.[[69]](#_ftn69)

Note: This is why the free market has been relatively effective at reducing famines and mass starvation when contrasted with centralized governing systems. While the free market is much more susceptible to problems relating to the tragedy of the commons[[70]](#_ftn70) (e.g., environmental issues), free markets are highly resistant to inefficiency resulting from misinformation when contrasted with other forms of social structures due to systems at lower levels of production being more “closed.”

If a company is not producing as much grain, it is hard for it to fake this failure as it relates to the company’s profits and the company’s impact on the economy will intrinsically shrink as a result. Even if a company did successfully find a way to fake production quantities, this would be a short-lived phenomenon due to short sellers.

Short selling allows any individual to make a fortune if they successfully catch a company lying about something material to their profit, short them, and release said information. In non-capitalist systems, the reward for identifying misinformation about quotas is minuscule and doing so could even get an individual killed. (Note: Capitalist societies don’t fare much better in tragedy of the commons issues; we are only referring to shortages driven by misinformation.)

The Case of Modern Academia

An individual’s status within the academic system is determined in large part by their h-index—a figure indicating how many people have cited papers they have authored or co-authored. As academics are incentivized to publish papers that will get citations, most don’t bother to publish studies with results that reinforce the status quo. This adverse incentive produces variance within more subjective fields of inquiry and likely contributes to the replication crisis currently plaguing many fields (essentially, people are beginning to find that a large number of widely-cited studies are not reproducible).

Worse, the current system for entering academia essentially forces people to choose the same field of exploration as their academic advisor—or at least something adjacent. If a fledgling academic would like to explore an obscure or unpopular subject, they will have great difficulty finding an advisor, end up with a weak network (given the lack of conferences related to their field), struggle to publish research, and see very few people cite any research they ultimately publish.

What does this failure look like in practice? It causes “eddies” of information to form in which tons of effort is spent on specific questions while other questions are completely ignored. This was widely apparent to us when we began drafting a book on early child development. While we found hundreds of studies on the long-term effects of breastfeeding, there was pretty much nothing exploring the long-term effects of epidurals. This is bizarre, as we know that epidurals pool in infants’ brains at four times the rate of mothers’ brains and that a pregnant mother’s consumption of other types of narcotics has a long-term effect on child brain development. Doing a study to look at the effects of epidurals on long-term brain development wouldn’t even be that hard—in fact, we plan to run one after the book is published and don’t expect it to cost more than $10,000.

How can we have whole conferences dedicated to the effects of breastfeeding on brain development and not a single comprehensive, long-term (more than a 15-year effect) study on the effects of epidurals on cognition (IQ, career success, or behavioral issues) even though they are used in 71% of births?

As mentioned, graduate students end up focusing on their advisors’ areas of research—so if a student’s advisor has a schtick around breast milk, they will be pressured to develop one as well. If this student wishes to move up, they will have to publish research on popular topics to ensure their papers get cited. If no one is writing about the long-term effects of epidurals, a study on them will not be cited as much as one on a field associated with a dedicated and active research community.

This sort of eddy isn’t limited to this field—the citation and tenure system of academia has set human knowledge back decades and is compounding. As the system ages, the bureaucracy deepens, and the eddies become larger.

The problem extends beyond these shortcomings. A recent study found that even the system determining what does and does not get published is essentially nonfunctional. One group of researchers found that among papers submitted to two peer reviewers, 50% of acceptance decisions were different, with the correlation between two review scores being only 0.55.[[71]](#_ftn71)

Even when analyzing the exact same data and presented with the same question, researchers come out all over the place. A whopping 29 teams, representing a total of 61 international researchers, were given the same data set to answer the question: “Are soccer referees more likely to give red cards to players with darker skin than to those with lighter skin?” While 69% found a significant effect, 31% found that there was not a significant effect.[[72]](#_ftn72)

This was not a one-off finding. In another experiment, 161 researchers working in 73 independent research teams were given the same data set and asked: “Will more immigration reduce public support for government provision of social policies?” Of the teams, 25.4% reported that immigration would have a negative effect, 57.7% reported it would have no effect, and 16.9% reported that it would have a positive effect. The authors of the study could not explain 95% of the total variance in researchers’ conclusions.[[73]](#_ftn73)

There is no system disincentivizing academics from publishing non-replicable research. Research published in even the most prestigious journals is often non-replicable. A full 38% of psychology results published in Nature and Science were non-replicable.[[74]](#_ftn74) This explains in part why productivity in many scientific fields has crashed over the last few decades.[[75]](#_ftn75)

Having started his career in academia, Malcolm could go on forever about the failures of the current system. Our nonprofit is working to create alternative methods of investigation and information dissemination like the Collins Institute (CollinsInstitute.org). One solution to the adverse incentives fueling these failures of the higher academic realm involves an end to government-backed student loans. In addition to preventing millions of children from screwing up their lives with inescapable debt, eliminating government-backed student loans would force academic institutions to cease operating as self-perpetuating machines exempt from consequences for failure and instead begin equipping people to be productive members of the modern economy.

Judging the Quality of a Government

The metrics used to determine a governing body’s quality are far more interesting than you might imagine. From a pragmatist’s perspective, the quality of a thing should be judged by how well it achieves its purpose—but such judgments are not straightforward.

The Will of the People

Suppose a democracy’s goal is to act on the will of its citizens. In a region populated with both a modest number of long-term landowners who plan to stay their whole lives and a greater number of short-term renters who plan to leave after half a decade, whose will matters more when the landowners’ and renters’ interests conflict?

Landowners benefit from improving the quality of the neighborhood and have more “ownership” of the neighborhood due to the financial sacrifices they made to cultivate it. Renters make up more of the population of the neighborhood and along that metric have more “ownership.”

Renters will favor governance that deprioritizes long-term benefits in favor of short-term gains (such as low rents at the expense of gentrification that improves the overall area) whereas landowners are incentivized to vote for governance that makes short-term sacrifices in favor of long-term gains (such as gentrification that augments property values—but also raises the local cost of living). In such a case, what does a “competent” government do if competence is gauged by the extent to which the government acts on the will of the populace?

Democracies are rife with confusion over the actual will of the people. The will of the people often requires more honesty than most are comfortable providing. Furthermore, the will of today’s people often conflicts with the will of the people in the future. Consider draconian U.K. porn laws outlawing any porn depicting someone who is plausibly being hurt as an example of the former[[76]](#_ftn76) (something consumed by more than half the populace but that no one wants to be seen supporting publicly—see: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality). Climate change presents an example of the latter (something that, if ignored, benefits society over the short term while compromising society over the long run).

Creativity

It can be beneficial to judge governing bodies on the creativity with which they develop strategies for achieving their goals. Is the governing body capable of forming and acting on totally new ideas—or is it only capable of iteration? Governments often lose the ability to form novel strategies when total failure is punished too fervently or when large leaps in efficiency are rewarded only a little bit more than baby steps.

This is one reason why capitalism is so effective as a sub-governance model despite its many shortcomings. Rather than rewarding a large leap in efficiency with triple the salary and a more secure job, as is common in non-capitalist systems, capitalism rewards leaps in efficiency proportionally to their impact on society (with billions of dollars), all while putting the cost of failure almost entirely on the individual and those who believed in said individual, such as investors (which minimizes downside risk to society). (Note: The U.S. is not a “pure” capitalist country, which is why it occasionally bails out businesses and industries “too big to fail.”)

For an example of how creativity is stifled in non-capitalist systems, read up on the development of the T-72.[[77]](#_ftn77) In innovating this tank’s design, Major General Kartsev ignored the prescriptions of a better-connected team because he believed he could develop something better. While was right (and his designs are now widely used), the rewards for “winning” were given to the team he defied and he was stripped of all his positions for daring to challenge his well-connected “superiors.” Why would someone invest in innovation in a system that punishes those who disrupt the status quo?

Efficiency

In a similar vein, one might judge governing quality by evaluating how costly it is to get the component parts of a government to move. Network management theory asks how something like local government should be structured to efficiently incentivize the pursuit of its goals (such as making an area nicer) without creating wasted “energy.” How do you create a governance system that offers the minimum necessary reward in order to incentivize desired behavior? This type of question is called “enoughsmanship.”

Friction

Consider excess heat put off by team disagreements (where we return to our previous analogy with heat being money lost due to friction). How much is the system hurt when two components bear animosity toward each other and how frequent are those types of occurrences? Yet again, capitalism is well suited to address this problem. In capitalist systems, teams that hate each other are able to turn that hatred into competitive fuel with minimal loss. The less “efficient” economic unit plays a smaller and smaller role over time in a healthy capitalist system.

Longevity

A governing body’s success could be judged by its tenure—how long it existed as originally designed—but even this is a more nuanced measure than one may think. I (Malcolm) got my undergraduate degree at St Andrews University in Scotland. At the center of the university was a collapsed cathedral—one of the most beautiful sites I have seen in my life. The state into which the cathedral had collapsed had remained largely constant for hundreds of years, as could be seen from old pictures. The cathedral had actually been in this static “ruined” state for a longer period than it was in its “operational” state. Often the form into which a thing collapses is more stable than its original design. In terms of governance structures, something similar can be seen in the form of the U.S. government. The U.S. government was explicitly designed to prevent many of the things that are core to its function today—like citizens voting directly for a president, party systems, a strong judiciary and executive branch, etc. Yet, few would call the U.S. a failed state or even ineffective at achieving its founders’ goals.

To explore enforcement mechanisms used in governance systems as well as common points of inefficiency like rent-seeking and the flypaper effect, refer to pages 377 and 379 of the Appendix.

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