Weyl
Article
Weyl is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 29, 2021 and January 31, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Weyl starts by defining technocracy”; “Weyl takes exactly the thing Niemeyer didn’t do”; “Weyl doesn’t care at all about this axis; he seems to be assuming top-down intervention”. It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, AI alignment problem, Anand Giridharadas.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: January 29, 2021
- Last seen: January 31, 2021
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
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- AI alignment problem (1 shared issues)
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- Anand Giridharadas (1 shared issues)
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- Bill Gates (1 shared issues)
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- Biosecurity And Pandemic Preparedness Program (1 shared issues)
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- Brasilia (1 shared issues)
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- climate change (1 shared issues)
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- Continental philosophy (1 shared issues)
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- COVID (1 shared issues)
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- Dexedrine (1 shared issues)
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- Duncan (1 shared issues)
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- EA (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I am not defending technocracy. But I do like evidence-based policy. So I read with interest Glen Weyl's Why I Am Not A Technocrat. It starts with a short summary of Seeing Like A State. It ties this into modern "evidence-based policy" and "mechanism design". It talks about how technocrats will always have their own insular culture and biases and paradigms, which prevent them from seeing the real world in its full complexity. Therefore, we should be careful about supposedly "objective" policies, and make sure they are always heavily informed by real people's real knowledge. Then it draws on vague rumors of the "rationalist community" and a shadowy figure named "Eliezer Yudkowsky" to create a completely fictional reimagination of us as a group of benighted people who don't understand any of these things, and just go around saying "hurr durr top-down systems are great, no way there could possibly be anything our models don't capture."
Inline links: Why I Am Not A Technocrat
Weyl starts by defining technocracy:
Did you notice none of Weyl's examples of technocracy fit this definition at all? Robert Moses had zero formal training in urban planning or anything related to city-building. The Soviet leadership wasn't "meritocratically chosen". And Oscar Niemeyer didn't construct a High Modernist planned village and a control village, test which one performed better on various metrics, and scale the winner up into Brasilia.
4. Re: the series of Weyl posts - nostalgebraist weighs in. His explanation of what Weyl might have been trying to say helps it make more sense to me (which of course makes it suspect).
Inline links: nostalgebraist weighs in, makes it suspect