The story of modern government is the attempt to abolish judgement. To outsource decisions to some set of "neutral" procedures which will self-execute, free from the corrupting influence of human interests. The paradox of people supporting "democracy" but opposing "politics" https://twitter.com/RokoMijicUK/status/1388198118110412801

The problem with "government by smart contract" is the same problem as "government by science" or "government by expert." Humans have interests and those interests will creep into whatever system you devise. Power is existential. You never get rid of it, only obfuscate it.

Modern man is deeply uncomfortable with power and therefore eager to make power as nebulous as possible. In obscuring power, he ensures that power will never be held to account and therefore never have an incentive to do good. This is the nature of what we call "democracy."

This is the fundamental Nrx critique. Instead of trying in vain to escape from power, we should create a system that incentivizes it to do good. In a monarchy, for instance, the king's power is tied to the long-term wellbeing of his country. Nobody wants to rule over nothing.

You can never guarantee that a king /will/ be good. You can only guarantee that being good is in his self-interest. Abusive parents may exist, but parents in aggregate are the people with the greatest incentive to make good decisions for their children. So too with government.

Giving power to procedure does not eliminate the component of human judgement, it just decouples that judgement from any feedback mechanism that can keep it in check. It's been a year of Covid, now. Does anyone still believe that "Government by science" is in any way "objective"?

The scientific method can achieve great things, but when "the science" is put in charge of government, it starts to look...different. It makes implausible and contradictory claims. It starts to assert moral authority. The entire endeavor becomes corrupt. https://twitter.com/kwamurai/status/1282008102406164480?s=20

This is not limited to "government by science." In law, conservatives thought they had achieved a theory of textual supremacy that would restrain progressive innovations. But the mechanical interpretation of a text still rests on human decisions about how to define words.

A redefinition or two later and Trump's first supreme court appointee rules that sex discrimination encompasses transgender people, a concept which didn't even exist at the time the law in question was enacted. "Text" means nothing without definitions. It does not read itself.

"Government by expertise" is weaponized to redefine words themselves in order to achieve political ends. Can white people experience racism? Is gender dysphoria a mental illness? The underlying phenomena do not change, only how experts choose to label them. Is this not politics?

Many people love to complain about gerrymandering. Instead of making congressional districts a matter of partisan political struggle, they say, we should hand the decisions over to a body of "experts" who can decide a "rational" way to allocate voters.

But there is no way to draw lines that optimize every value people claim to want. Districts in which minority votes are spread out and diluted are "racist." Limiting minority votes to one concentrated district is also "racist." How to answer the question is indeterminate.

Any number of different allocations can be rationally justified, and with vastly different political implications. In what way can such a process be neutral? It can't. Its inherently political nature can only be hidden and outsourced to highly interested but unaccountable actors.

All of these examples illustrate the problem with @RokoMijicUK's suggestion and the reason why Moldbug opposes it. Government by process is the very thing Nrx opposes. The problem is not Skynet getting the nuclear codes. The problem is making power unaccountable and indifferent

The blockchain may be unhackable, but the terms of a contract never can be. One person's interpretation of reality must always take precedence. This is an unavoidable fact of human civilization. You can never "fix" it, you can only set the incentives and hope power follows them