Weyl Contra Me On Technocracy
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Follows up on
↳ Contra Weyl On Technocracy — Essay · Jan 2021
Summary
Glen Weyl's reply to Scott's critique of his technocracy essay, elevated to a top-level post (Scott's standing offer to anyone he criticizes). Weyl's 8-point rebuttal: he's a mechanism designer, so casting him as anti-technology/anti-mechanism misreads him; his target was the over-zealous 'spirit of mechanism design'; he offers contemporary (not canonical) technocracy examples; disputes Scott's positive examples (desegregation had decades of activism; Taiwan's COVID success ran through Audrey Tang, who left Silicon Valley rationalism); argues good mechanisms must be adopted through cross-value public communication; and that 'science'/'mechanism' isn't unitary but a claim to unaccountable unbiased reasoning; plus the point that democracy isn't coterminal with one-person-one-vote.
Why this score
Quality 60 · Strong. Solid (upper)/low-Strong: a substantive intellectual reply (mechanism-design, democracy-beyond-voting, the Audrey-Tang counterexample), but a hosted rebuttal in mostly Weyl's words, dense and dependent on the original exchange for context.
Claude’s paradigm shift 45 · Moderate. Moderate: the 'mechanism is not a unitary unbiased thing but a mode claiming to be unaccountable' and democracy-beyond-voting points are substantive, though this is one side of a debate.
Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor/within-discourse: an intellectual reply on technocracy; no material footprint.