belos

People often use this to imply that we can't make better things. That's a really sad belief. I will agree that it's tremendously hard, and requires enormous care, but the Founders of the US weren't gods. They didn't have perfect knowledge of all possible ways of organizing things. With science we say we stand on the shoulders of giants, and I think it's possible to do so in this realm too.

This is absolutely one of my favorite quotes, because it’s both true, and points to what we need, which is better systems. I’m currently writing out a design for a better system! At the moment I’ve published some work toward it, including commentaries on some of the major problems a new design needs to resolve. Some of the key ones include the dilution of representation, which means that emotional appeals have a much easier time driving voter behavior, bundled governance, which means we get far less expertise among our policymakers, and lack of justifiable governance - we don’t have to prove that our rules do what we intended them to do.

I’d love to invite more folks to give feedback and think about some of these ideas. It is possible to design a better system, but somewhere along the way we sort of gave up on doing more than incremental reform. I'm currently still laying foundations, but hope to be laying out a worked out proposal within the next few months.

https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/a-beginning https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/table-of-contents