What plausible outside views are there? How much to rely on which?
Here is another possible outside view one could take. Under this view, the question of how societies govern themselves is subject to evolutionary dynamics. (You allude to this a bit in one of your footnotes, when talking about economic determinism.) Different societies adopt different approaches, and societies with better approaches are more successful and become more dominant. Less successful societies either cease to exist or adopt the better approaches by imitation. Based on this view, we can identify “evolutionary pressures” and know some things about where these pressures are likely to steer us in the future. (Obviously we still don’t know exactly where this development leads us, but the space of possible developments is in fact constrained by these co-evolutionary dynamics.)
What specifically might “fitness” look like here? Taking a perspective as roughly outlined in this paper, we could posit that in order for a species to grow ever larger in scale, it requires (what in the paper is called) information processing capacity. Democracy (or government/the policy making apparatus at large) can be viewed as essentially such an information processing technology, and thus adaptive/fitness enhancing. Given the size and complexity of present day societies, it does look like the largely top-down information processing technology of an authoritative regime would less adaptive.
One can argue that democracy is a “successful adaptation” and thus is likely stick around. Maybe this is true, but I think this argument is way harder to make than what I’ve offered above, and I’m not actually sure it stands. Reasons why this isn’t straightforward include that the evolutionary dynamics described above are not very pure (compared to “proper” Darwinian natural selection), and that the environmental conditions within which the process unfolds are changing drastically, which could for example mean that adaptations that were fitness enhancing in the past won’t be in the future.
The reason I do bring this argument up however is that I think it suggests that we shouldn’t pay much attention to the “regression to the means” type arguments. I agree this is a prior to use, but I think we know enough about the territory that we shouldn’t rely much on it.
(I don’t necessarily think you do (though I don’t know). This is to say, I can see how you might get to the 4 in 5 prediction without invoking a “regression to the means” type argument, but by solely looking at the arguments you have for example layed out in your section on automation.)
What plausible outside views are there? How much to rely on which?
Here is another possible outside view one could take. Under this view, the question of how societies govern themselves is subject to evolutionary dynamics. (You allude to this a bit in one of your footnotes, when talking about economic determinism.) Different societies adopt different approaches, and societies with better approaches are more successful and become more dominant. Less successful societies either cease to exist or adopt the better approaches by imitation. Based on this view, we can identify “evolutionary pressures” and know some things about where these pressures are likely to steer us in the future. (Obviously we still don’t know exactly where this development leads us, but the space of possible developments is in fact constrained by these co-evolutionary dynamics.)
What specifically might “fitness” look like here? Taking a perspective as roughly outlined in this paper, we could posit that in order for a species to grow ever larger in scale, it requires (what in the paper is called) information processing capacity. Democracy (or government/the policy making apparatus at large) can be viewed as essentially such an information processing technology, and thus adaptive/fitness enhancing. Given the size and complexity of present day societies, it does look like the largely top-down information processing technology of an authoritative regime would less adaptive.
One can argue that democracy is a “successful adaptation” and thus is likely stick around. Maybe this is true, but I think this argument is way harder to make than what I’ve offered above, and I’m not actually sure it stands. Reasons why this isn’t straightforward include that the evolutionary dynamics described above are not very pure (compared to “proper” Darwinian natural selection), and that the environmental conditions within which the process unfolds are changing drastically, which could for example mean that adaptations that were fitness enhancing in the past won’t be in the future.
The reason I do bring this argument up however is that I think it suggests that we shouldn’t pay much attention to the “regression to the means” type arguments. I agree this is a prior to use, but I think we know enough about the territory that we shouldn’t rely much on it.
(I don’t necessarily think you do (though I don’t know). This is to say, I can see how you might get to the 4 in 5 prediction without invoking a “regression to the means” type argument, but by solely looking at the arguments you have for example layed out in your section on automation.)