alt Hacker NewsTechnocracy always struck me as weirdly incoherent? If you take the economy, probably the most studied of government policies, it is not 1 number. There are many questions about what priorities ought to be. There is no 'expert' answer for how many starving poor people are a worthy trade off for a GDP point. Even if there was, there is an economist branch that disagrees with any possible position you might take. The question of which experts to listen to almost entirely subsumes the question of what experts say. More than anything it's a branding strategy. "Putting me, a surveillance investor, in charge of international relations is clearly more rational and scientific than putting the other guy in charge."
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My theory
It coalesced at a time when science was becoming more accessible to the masses, more educated technicians running around engaging in work and trade.
And these technicians were frustrated by bosses who didn't understand the science and technique behind things.
So there was great inefficiency because the bosses hadn't caught up to the technicians in their understanding of the world.
And so the political idea of "put in charge the people who actually understand the problem" caught hold of the technicians, and they were fired up for a period of time and they called it technocracy.
Hubris. Is the same mindset that leads to socialism, central planning, social darwinism, etc. The temptation of "theory" without the suffering from pesky reality.
This comment strikes me as weirdly incoherent.
It seems to be an assemblage of random political ranting (derived from mainstream US politics) instead of addressing anything about the Technocracy movement of the 1930s.
I don't think so. Ideally, you still have normal people deciding tradeoffs like today, it's just that the reasoning and the suggested solutions to problems have to be scientifically and logically sound.
The submission[0] right next to this one shows why.
Apparently, in the US, you are now a criminal if you fly drones half a mile from ICE vehicles. Some of which may be unmarked and even if marked, how exactly do you verify no ICE vehicle is in a 0.785 square mile radius? Anybody capable of logical thought sees that this is BS.
(Also, anybody who retained primary school knowledge can calculate the area. But ask a person on the street to do it and watch your faith in humanity fall. Ask them to point out the area on a map and estimate how many cars that would be...)
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Even the lawyer who taught intro to law at my uni always said that the people who most often find contradictions in laws are engineers.
The problems always start when somebody takes an ideology too far. So let's figure out what is too far instead of rejecting the whole thing.
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One issue with economy as a science is that it's a very soft science at best and just pseudoscience at worst.
Which then kind of defeats the purpose of experts in the sense of technocracy.
As an analogy, you can make a PhD in theology, but that is not proof that God exists.