[ExI] Political correctness consequences

[Anders Sandberg]

I don't know. I honestly wonder about the meme diversity in past elite 
groups. Most examples I can think of were very homogeneous. Perhaps the 
restoration era British elite were unusual in the existence of the 
protestant and catholic views, except that I think that was more 
political standpoints. Maybe in some periods the Athenian agora was 
relatively diverse, but there are tricky magnification effects here 
since we mostly know it from a few sources.

Elites tend to be small and recruited from similar backgrounds, so there 
is not much room for natural divergence. The cost of fundamental 
conflicts can be severe (normal political conflict is bad enough, 
disagreement on the very foundations of how a society is run is very 
destructive).

The interesting question is how to set up systems that enable diverse 
elites, or to investigate what other possibilities are open.


On 2016-08-04 05:49, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 4:18 AM, Anders <anders at aleph.se 
> <mailto:anders at aleph.se>> wrote:
>
>>     Lack of ideological diversity among elites, the almost complete
>>     takeover of positions of power by politically correct cadres in a
>>     number of countries, is therefore a major flaw of the current
>>     global political system.
>
>     What periods or places have shown ideological diversity among elites?
>
>
> ### Perhaps I should have left out the word "current" from my post. 
> Indeed, as you imply, ideological purity tended to become a touchstone 
> of belonging to elites throughout history and today's world is not 
> much different from empires past.
>
> The one salient difference might be the homogenising influence of 
> media, both mass and social. Ideology spreads now more easily between 
> countries, increasing the risk of forming a world government at some 
> point.
>
> Rafał
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat


-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160804/e453bc1a/attachment.html>