I used to believe very hard in technocratic governments where experts lead instead of politicians merely consulting with them as most countries do (or pretend to do to give cover to whatever they'd do anyway). Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average but I can't even remember sources, just that after reading about I became less of a believer. I really want to believe it has to be better than having old people who's whole career is politics but who knows.
Lots of governments just end up with career lawyers and politicians.
They can choose their advisors and their advice.
The more varied experts you can get into parliament, the more likely you have an on the record disagreement from an expert preventing a politician from choosing the incorrect advice that suits them better.
Thats not to say they are going to be any better for corruption, but in todays world there are so many deep silos that governments just completely step over and disregard.
Rationality has to be guided by common sense. I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders but we have those in ample supply and with the computers now reasoning with us I don’t think we need more of those. Rationality is a solved problem as far as I’m concerned. We have other issues. We lack a coherent moral vision, societal cohesion, stability, sanity. Once you lose those it doesn’t really matter what system you implement, it’s just delaying the inevitable.
> I’m sure Nazi Germany had many extraordinarily capable technocratic leaders [...]
Actually, not. They had a few left-over from when Germany had a functioning state, but the Nazis were overall fairly incompetent at actually running the country.
How were the Nazis technocrats? The core of the Nazi party were weirdo political extremists and violently nationalistic army veterans. The only example I can think of which matches your idea of an 'extraordinarily capable technocratic leader' is Speer, and like his military counterpart Rommel, his reputation has been somewhat laundered and propagandised both during and after the war.
> Supposedly very technocatric governments end up being more corrupt than average
Hardly. But it depends on who is on board.
Corruption exists everywhere. Do you think that Vukic was
less corrupt? I am pretty certain you will find many people
in Serbia who want to fix the country. Other Europeans would
ask: why let only poor countries join? They drain money from
richer countries. Switzerland and Norway will never join and
they know why. Hint: there is a reason they are rich.
Second hint: they got rich without the EU.
Which country got rich with the EU? I don't know of a single
one. Germany was already wealthy before the EU was founded.
France is now in debt crisis from which it can not escape,
so it will drag the whole EU down.
Any system no matter how well intentioned will outlast its usefulness and eventually dies. I think the key is to see it in the moment and immediate future — Serbia's Gen Z's GDP/GINI/what-have-you is a good yardstick to measure that. So its kind of weird to say we believe because every time something like this is tried it really is different and whatever you/I believe in _never_ lasts even our lifespans.
In a muddled political system(democratic or otherwise) today its about power and how is it balanced. When Nandan Nilekani was creating India's UIDAI(the national aadhar system), he insisted that he would only do the project if he was given a cabinet level post[1]. His is one of the few technology examples to succeed in India when most large government run projects are a disaster. ISRO is probably another decent example of success. I think Nilekani succeeded because he had a clear moral compass and a defined goal.
But there is a problem with kings, soon they have an asshole child.
Metaphorically speaking at least. UIDAI is being used stupidly enough like an SSN now and in ways it was never meant to be.
At a guess, 30% of the speeches given today in parliaments across the western world were already written/inspired by an LLM. This is somewhat inevitable.
Since they are not a political party, the issue will be who will run the institutions. They have 250 people on the election list. Institutions are also made of people. I believe these people are smart and know what they are doing, but they cannot do all of it themselves. I support this "experiment", but it will be interesting to see where they will find hundreds if not thousands of people to run the country. An established party has members as a pool to pick from.
You cannot setup a team of dozens of people to run an important sector of the whole country by having them apply for positions. Not even companies hire that way, most companies hire based on recommendations and contacts.
Not every country has a spoil system, there's probably no need to change anyone in the institutions (except those very close to Vučić in dangerous positions)
This is true, but doesn't contradict my statement. As I said, I am looking forward to this and am in fact not that pessimistic. But in the end you need actual people, and these need to be found.
I unfortunately predict doom for this group. Statecraft is largely about coalition building and who is doing favors for whom. Without this the wheels simply stop turning, public bureaucracies stop cooperating, private funding dedicates itself to destroying you instead of supporting you. This is never going to change, this is how politics is, it's why parties always form even when we try to prevent them.
The essential factor in whether a state is good or bad for the people at large is arguably whether you can draw a clear line around which sorts of favoritism are permitted and which are outlawed as corrupt, and actually achieve enforcement when people in power inevitably break these rules. A cardiologist, bioarchaeologist and a physicist are going to know nothing about all of this. Their job is to work with the incumbent bureaucrats and elites who hold the real power in that society and those people will almost certainly run circles around them. Fantasyland Reddit politics consists of making aggressive, principled statements. Real world politics is about recognizing you have to deal with a ton of people who are quite frequently awful but because they've managed to cling to one lever of influence or another you can't ignore them. They are moving things in a the direction you don't want them to go every day so what do you do about them? Jail them? Kill them? Buy them off? Cut a deal with them? Make them see reason even though it's against their personal interest because you're just that smart? (lol!) You can't ignore them. It's nothing like the deterministic systems all these people have studied. I wish them luck but I think I know how this is gonna end.
It was an amazing achievement for the students list movement to get such a diverse group of new politicians elected. I’m very curious to see how government formation without a figurehead/leader goes. Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end. Most also put a lot of power in that person’s hands with backbenchers sidelined from the day to day running.
I really hope their success carries over into governance.
Maybe. Politics is a skill, and not everyone has a knack for it. It’s dirty, requires compromise, and a willingness to work with your opponents. Or, well, at least it used to.
I think he means poltician's lying, being trecherous, compromising until nothing gets done and no one's career is hurt, etc is a skill. It would be better for the people if people with these skills were not in public office. Anything that takes away from being a servant to the constituents and become self-service needs to be removed from Politics.
I'm not sure if it used to be like that, but the skill required to politicians now is to get themselves elected, and that largely means the ability to lie well
It very much is, but I don't believe it is the skill of "solving problems" or "making society better".
Politics is about getting elected. Convincing the people that it's all the others' fault, that you know better, that you will save the world. And then when they get elected... we naively expect them to solve problems. But we selected them for their capacity at being selected, not their capacity at understanding the big problems society is facing...
Yes. That’s kind of the point. The words aren’t that far apart in etymology either. By Latin definitions the most popular (liked by the general public) candidate will be the democratically chosen (rule by the people) one.
It depends on the political system. In many a parliamentary system, voting differently than what you are told means you will not be in the party list ever again, so for the day to day, there's very little convincing effort when you have the majority. And especially in systems where there is very little legal money in politics, the carrot is just ability to get access for not-so-legal money. So party leadership is a matter of having enough businessmen friends, and having will to power in a rather unclean word.
The whole "you are just one vote" doesn't really apply there. As the 30th legislator on your party list, you show up and vote as you are told. And in systems like the one in the US, barring rare moments, it's also not all that different. The card that your party will abandon you, and that if you want a position of any importance you have to play ball means many a junior congressperson just votes as they are told, and spends time fundraising.
Getting elected is table stakes and shows you have the soft skills needed to organise, campaign and convince. Which is the minimum you need to get disparate groups of humans to pull in the same direction and make progress in advancing the country.
Theres no consolation if you get experts to plan solutions to problems but 1) the people you need to implement the plans have their own opinions or priorities and 2) the public want focus in some other priority and are start rioting if they don't feel heard.
You need schmoozers as much as you need tacticians.
There are two largely non-overlapping skillsets when it comes to politics and governance.
The soft skills being effective means you can get elected, that does not mean they are good at governing (and is often a detriment to having good solutions and governance).
I don't currently have any data that says otherwise and the counterfactual remains unexplored (but it will be with this parliament!), but things that people do and say to get elected often are things that if implemented...would not solve the problems the populace that elected is having.
I don't think we need schmoozers, we need people who understand the problems of their populace and have the structural power to implement their solutions. We shall see if they need more than this, but this would be the first exploration of the counterfactual.
People who have their "own" priorities don't end up upsetting the apple cart when we make success in implementing those solutions the same as their success (which if we are effective problem solvers, should be possible. See Deng Xiaoping)
A lot of the problem can be attributed to voters accepting the blame game, overly simplistic solutions, and expedient absolutist views over debating a plurality of options.
I'm not saying that the political system isn't to blame here. At least where I live, it is structured in such a way that winner takes all and loyalty to the party is more heavily rewarded than representing the constituent. But, again, that is a system that we in some sense designed.
Absolutely. the first time I found out the Chinese have quite a few engineers involved in government. I said that explains all the infrastructure being built. Mind you no human endeavors are perfect. But there was a time in the United States not too long ago where there was more of a can do attitude, I don’t understand why high-speed rail is not a thing.
I also don’t understand why the Pan American Highway or rail from Nome, Alaska to the tip of South America never got built. Nor can I understand why Oak Ridge, Tennessee Thorium Research Center and further development was left to rot. The Chinese are very close to throwing element 90 in our face.
I would assume PhD holding people are smart enough to understand their limitations and strengths.
They've been elected during a very special events. They know what's expected of them. Looks like compared to the previous powers this lot at least gives the country a fighting chance.
Ehhh, that's the flaw in the logic. Holding a PhD doesn't necessarily make you better at anything other than strictly the topic of the PhD (and sometimes not even that), maybe only following arbitrary orders from senior figures.
Holding a PhD at the very least means you can spend a sustained long amount of time on (potentially) intractable problems and try to arrive at solutions for them. That's a good skill to have when...you've been elected to solve problems.
Competence of democratic politicians is to be liked and get most votes. Usually it means to be without values.
I hope more people will realize that voting for uknown politicians that offers empty promises for artificially made problems means givig up our responsibility and at the end, make things worse as we see in current democratic countries.
Management is basically 99% people's relations/network. It doesn't matter how good the technical implementations are at the top, if they don't have the knowledge and capacity to enforce it downstream from middle layer to the base. There's so much people involved whose interests are farmed by your competitors.
Imposing it top down requires oppression. Imposing or pressuring this huge layer from the bottom requires a continuously updated base so you can squeeze from the top and the bottom to enact the changes needed quickly.
It's impossible for leaders at the top, to personally vet the members of a village or city council for example.
I think I've never seen any of such concatenation of events and organization to have ever happened.
I believe this is the usual tension that's present even in private companies: are professional managers better than field experts at managing work?
The pure ideal is to get a field expert who is good at management — but sometimes hard to attain!
The question then really becomes if — for a manager — a senior expert is better
than an experienced manager who can detect exactly when to pull in the experts?
And this is probably always on a case-by-case basis: it completely depends on the circumstances, individual qualities, and supporting people around them to decide which is better for a given situation.
I believe the same holds here: the best you can get is an expert with a wide grasp of the entire field they will be active in, supported by good, smart common-sense people to manage and guide their thinking and solutioning in the right way.
The tension between effectiveness (cohesive decisions swiftly implemented) and representation (complex reduction of utterly disparate points of view to a workable compromise) is the main force at the core of democracy.
Most of the electorate doesn't really understand it, constantly clamoring for one or the other to be the only guiding principle, but you need both - and one has to find a way even when they appear completely irreducible. Democracy is beautiful in a very messy way, a bit like nature.
I believe this is also what colours our views of the general academic infighting — academics are rarely rotated out except in the lower ranks, so it's a different type of skillset of building long-term alliances that drives their progression through the academic field and available careers in a particular institution (not even talking about "academic points" through publishing in recognized journals, which is a different discussion altogether — even with that criteria satisfied, to move to the next rank of professorship, you need to be elected by your colleagues).
Basically, academic tenure is opposite from democracy.
The usual grifters have had their chance in most Western governments. Lawyers, landlords, the gentry, etc… I am skeptical but the present bunch that is usually very well represented in most western/eastern governments have had plenty of time and opportunity and look where we are at now.
"in academics the in-fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low" - interesting to see what happens now that that stakes are just democracy and an entire country!
Seems pretty obvious to me that it's not going to be 80 academics debating everything under the sun, but instead dedicated groups focusing on their expertise area...
I laughed out loud at this — my dad is a retired Uni professor, so I know exactly what you are talking about — but I'd point out that the "student list" has around 140 seats in the parliament, so 80 academics hopefully still has another 60 common sense people who are not all about being right all the time, and who bring other perspectives too.
> MAN have you ever SEEN a working group of 80 academics?
As compared to what? A working group of 80 uneducated idiots?
If democracy doesn't work if you put smart, educated people in control then it doesn't work, period and we need to pay better attention to whatevere China is doing.
China has more engineers involved in their government. Who tend to be more clear- thinking let’s solve the problem at hand. Which explains why they have so many infrastructure projects going on across their country.
It also partially explains why they pursue are open to multiple solutions to a problem. And it certainly explains why they looked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and that thorium research and built two thorium reactors and will probably build many more because guess what?
They figured out how to make it work and apparently solved that alloy molten salt problem, it took about 10-15 years but they are on schedule. to deploy many more reactors after 2029.
They also switched or are are in the process of switching from lithium batteries to sodium ion batteries which is something else they didn’t have to do, they could hung on to lithium through 2040 milking, but instead they are moving on, which is also something that can happen when you have a bunch of engineers involved in the decision-making as opposed to those finance/MBA people who have a tendency to want to milk people for as long as possible.
which is why one or more gravitate to academic administrator, eventually become a professional politician and we're right back to where we started. In the meantime either something exciting or absolutely nothing might happen!
There’s a chance of failure in any human endeavor. but I am sick of lawyers, bankers, landlords, lobbyists and various other grifters hanging on currently in most western governments no one can say that they haven’t had their chance. There needs to be a wider variety of professions involved at/in the legislative branch.
> An electrical engineer who has helped design robots. An organic chemist who, during the pandemic, worked on COVID-19 drugs. An education researcher, a sociologist, several political scientists, economists, physicians, and medical researchers.
Diverse? Over-educated university graduates is possibly the least diverse set of thinkers one could hope to find.
> Dozens of them come from the academic world, and more than half have a Ph.D. or M.D.
Lord help up. This is going to be demonstration of hubris and an exercise in arrogance.
> Still beats the alternative of corrupt career politicians.
Are you sure? After the covid and position of the scientific community on it's origin it is evident that most scientist are ready to do the exact things that corrupt career politicians are doing, but for free, purely for the love of the game.
Yeah, there's plenty of high-profile academic politicians in Europe with debatable legacies including Thatcher and Merkel. Time will tell.
A quick search suggests the economists associated with this movement are fairly 'mainstream' institutionalists of the type that's popular with government these days in the west. I don't think there will be big changes soon beyond dealing with corruption/nepotism.
Later on, I imagine they will push for faster EU integration on possibly slightly worse terms. Serbia may become marginally less independent in terms of fiscal policy at least and the markets might become even more exposed/beholden to foreign capital. This process has been in motion for years now and I don't expect the student movement to care - the upsides are broadly popular with younger people globally. Personally, I think it is deeply ironic that in the age of tariffs and huge government spending by the superpowers, small countries like Serbia are still signing up to be bound by the 'free market' consensus which is rapidly disintegrating globally.
She had a honors bachelors degree. An Oxford MA is awarded three years later on application, and is not an earned master’s degree.
Unusually for a politician, it was a science degree (chemistry), and she worked in a lab at school and after school briefly, but sure enough she got a law degree later, which is a typical politician route.
If her bachelors degree had been in humanities like most politicians we wouldn’t call her an academic. She had science training, which is great for a change. But she wasn’t an academic.
When people use the term, it is obviously not a reference to just "knowing things" but rather 1) the distinct socialization one gets in academia that leaves one rather divorced from the real world (and I say that as an academic), and 2) hyperspecialization to the point one loses the big picture, a problem in education today.
> distinct socialization one gets in academia that leaves one rather divorced from the real world
It is absurd claim. Academia is part of real world. It is not an isolated island cut off from everything else.
It is no more divorced from real world then any other group of people. No more divorced then rural farmer are divorced from it, businessmen are divorced from it, sports fans are divorced from it. They are all having limits of understanding other groups.
Tech workers as likely more divorced from average person even.
The problem is not in that they are divorced from the real world. The problem is in the model that science get financial support, which leads to the existence of filtering that eliminates from the science anyone who is not far-left loyal dog and supporter of the "current thing".
A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but better than a master of one because he has broad, intersectional knowledge. Academia is designed for specialization and the more you specialize in something the more you lose the forest for the trees.
Everything looks like a nail if you are a hammer and all that.
While the extreme "master of one" exists, most academics I know have cross-cutting interests.
We also shouldn't forget that the vast majority of politicians today are lawyers by education. To whatever degree your assumption holds, it is true of the status quo today as well. Even in that case, having a more diverse set of "masters of one" would be an improvement.
Academic credentials and knowledge have very little correlation. A master electrician knows things. So does an airline pilot in charge of hundreds of lives. Yet neither has letters after their name.
The constitution will necessitate a certain structure so it's not like "it can't work". It is working and then at some point soon the structure will be reified and some will be given more power and different portfolios than others.
as a Serb I can tell you it's because Swiss are very different people compared to the rest of the world, I hope this government will work for some time, but with our people I expect them to get some idiot into power again
The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
The CIA sponsored extensive studies on this and came to the conclusion that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure. It's not really surprising, and it can be seen in the US right now.
> The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.
The system we had in the US pre New Deal was much more like Switzerland. Decentralization works just fine out of the box. The problem is that human instinct tends towards power which requires more centralization to accumulate.
Yes and no. The US presidency is very different than the way it's reported on, but it is true that the executive branch is being more assertive to make up for the disfunction of the legislation. We're doing that intentionally and for good reason, to demonstrate to China that the US can act with speed as one small part of the overall deterrent against World War 3. The US is almost always hugely misunderstood, because there isn't any other country in the world that actually works exactly like the US does.
I mean ... most countries are run by some sort of committee hierarchy / supervisor chain. Having consulted at many different levels of govt. over here in Europe, I can tell you there are way more committee decisions than Executive directives.
In many cases, the executives / politicians / directors just rubber stamp what a working group / committee has decided.
The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor (they were vehemently opposed to the idea of putting so much power in the hands of one individual).
One of the ways they made this work was by assigning temporary powers to elected/appointed individuals appropriate and sufficient to get their job done, whether that was provincial governor, tribunus plebis, consul or whatever. A notable title was that of "dictator" (where the modern word derives from) which gave sweeping temporary powers to a general sufficient to execute a war.
Julius Caesar famously abused this system, effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator), although that did not end well for him. His successor, Augustus (whose adopted name later became the name of the office of emperor) initiated a more acceptable version of this by simultaneously holding multiple "elected" positions thereby having the power of them all.
> The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor
If you don't count the 80 years of off and on civil wars and political and social upheavals.
> and sufficient to get their job done
Well they were extremely successful military, internal politics were a mixed bag and it slowly turned into chaos and constant gridlock as soon as they ran out of external enemies to fight.
Rome had an arcane deeply adversarial political system which basically relied different powerful men in the elite competing and keeping each other in check while trying to amass as much wealth and political power they could get away with (Ceasar was hardly an aberration besides just being way more successful than countless aristocrats playing the same game).
> effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator),
The Roman Republic was incredibly decentralized with more people working for the administration of the city of Rome than for the Roman state itself at the time of Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Extreme executive power existed, but not at the level of the imperial administration. Provincial governors had near absolute power and generals had control over their armies to a degree well beyond what any general today has. They were basically private mercenaries with the generals, not the state, being in charge of payroll for the soldiers. Local territories had near 100% control of their own affairs so long as they did not do anything to interfere with the tribute flowing to Rome.
This became more centralized over time and as it did more executive power was needed at the top level. Augustus centralized the army under state control. Emperors in the late empire had nearly dictatorial authority and a massive state bureaucracy under their control.
Nice example of Poe's Law. I genuinely can't tell if this is a sincere comment written by someone who spent too much time in the start-up bubble, or a satirical comment on that type of person said by someone who very much aware that start-ups are just one of many ways humans can organize themselves and who knows that parliamentary politics is nothing like that for very good reasons.
But I do find it hilarious that apparently everyone assumes it to be the former, and that is quite telling about how most of this site's visitors think the other visitors of this site look at the world.
What anti-intellectual horse shit. Carney has a PhD in economics, for one. But there are many: Tomáš Masaryk, Manmohan Singh, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Ricardo Lagos, Mary Robinson, Lee Teng-hui, Tsai Ing-wen, Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel, Claudia Sheinbaum.
All these people have been been at the forefront of b ringin freedom, democracy, and well being to their populations. If anything, the "fun facts" show that academics can make great leaders.
> Most parliamentary democracies assume you are electing a person with the knowledge/hope the party leader will be sitting in the big chair at the end.
In Germany the focus is usually on the parties and not the figurehead for over 70 years now.
Yeah, the thing that really strikes me is that their movement _did not exist_ in the last election. Went from scratch to power in three years. Whatever you want to say about their politics or their ability to lead...sure. But that's an incredible thing to do.
US government organizations such as USAID and the CIA-adjacent National Endowment for "Democracy" backed this movement to the tune of millions of dollars, funding "civil society groups" and other NGOs. Yet supposedly it is spontaneous and grassroots, and we wonder how its governance will be decided.
Not necessarily, but do you think voting in the guy who held power for 13 years is going to help?
He clearly redirected the railway station maintenance budget to his friends instead, because he assumed the public were suckers who'd vote him back in no matter how badly he fucked up. Then the station canopy collapsed and killed people. Entirely avoidable.
When your leaders are nakedly corrupt, and through sheer luck you still have free and fair elections, you vote those fuckers out. Otherwise they'll fiddle while your country burns.
It looks like the public want someone else in charge, they'll give them a fair shake. Maybe the new lot will direct the treasure more appropriately.
Whilst it seems like a good idea to have academics run government, history has shown that countries run by engineers and scientists tend to end up with some great roads and dams, but failing economically and socially in almost every other way.
Idk which period you're referring to, but for a long time, the Politburo was nothing but Stalin's mouth piece, as was the Central Committee and the rest of the Party, ad they ruled through very hard repression. That puts a long-lasting kind of mark on a society that you can't engineer yourself out of. So I'd argue it's not much of an argument.
They need to translate the election victory into
tangible improvements and results. Otherwise
voters in Serbia would not see any difference to
the cleptocracy established by Vukic.
Hungary has this problem by the way - people thought
Péter Magyar will fix, and change, Hungary. Recently
Hungary signed a "we are ultra-right servants of
Trump" in the USA (see https://telex.hu/english/2026/10/30/hungarian-fm-and-rubio-s...), thus validating all those who pointed
out that Peter is just a younger face but the same
Orban 2.0 in the end.
Corruption runs very, very deep. I am also certain the Epstein
network is not only much bigger than known, but has different
actors and beneficiaries. To this day the US court system can
not explain why only Maxwell is in prison. That makes logically -
and logistically - no sense at all.
Can you elaborate? I mean to my limited outsider understanding, Magyar's entire platform "exactly as right wing as Orban, but with less corruption and with proper democratic civil liberties". Does signing some symbolic agreement about "boo antifa" really break with that promise?
Proper up to the point. No way he is giving up built in advantages right wing has in Hungary - like rural voters votes having way more power then city voters.
Sure but that’s a far cry to the “Magyar is just another Orbán style despot” vibe that this thread started with. It just means Hungary is Little America.
technocratic governments are great when a strong leadership is present that also listens to the technocracy. But it's important to realize that technical skill does not correlate with political skills like consensus building, horse trading, compromise, etc that make governments actually work.
What will happen here will strongly depend on how good these people are at actually playing the game of politics. I don't have any particular reason to be more or less optimistic than any regular slate of politicians.
Whilst politics always exist, how deep it goes varies.
It's entirly possible that the experiment fails because of politics, but it's also possible that the amount of politics is simply lower because people are simply more reasonable.
The last part will come down to vested interest and ideologues.
The regular slate (at least in the US) is that the majority are actively hostile to the technocracy, and would fail a 3rd grade science test. The best of them might actually be able to pass bachelor-level science tests, and sometimes pay lip service to scientific advisors.
So, it'd be a big step up if we had leaders that understood basic elementary school stuff stuff like bleach injections are not medicine (vs Trump), or that draining the California delta would be an ecological disaster (vs Newsom - https://stopthetunnels.org/).
US government-funded pro-opposition outlet BIRN through its Media Ownership Monitor Serbia project admits the central Student List media channels - N1 and Nova S - were created by former US director of the CIA David Petraeus via KKR and former US Ambassador to Serbia Cameron Munter;
The parent United Group was acquired and the media platforms built up from 2013-2014 onward as the center of opposition media in Serbia opposing Serbia’s existing leadership and institutions, and playing a central role in both “student protests” last year and the “Student List” movement this year;
United Group was only recently (earlier this year) acquired by Alpac Capital, but KKR still maintains an undisclosed amount of shares
with the move a likely an attempt to distance US involvement in the media network;
When “leaderless” and “decentralized” protests are praised in the Western media, scroll down in the article where they eventually admit who the leaders and organizations are behind them, perform a simple internet search to identify the key people and investments making them possible to determine whether a movement is indigenous or the product of foreign interference;
On the one hand, I have no doubt that the US and everyone else able would push their agenda in uncertain times. On the other, imagining that it is all CIA/FSB and so on denies agency to thousands of people who have put in the effort to change thier country.
Exactly. My fellow countrymen fucked my country (Brexit). Foreign meddling didn't help, but it also didn't hinder to the point of changing the outcome.
It was my fellow countrymen, and their long held Eurosceptic views, that fucked us. Russia posting divisive pish in 2016 has nothing on our decades of native politicians and newspapers blaming Brussels for everything bad (often its their own policies being policywashed) and pretending everything good came from them.
According to the government's own report, it did not. The meddling was insubstantial
Do you wonder why there even was a referendum?
Compare 1997: Sir Jammy Fishpaste hates Europe, spends millions of his own money promoting his Referendum Party, gets nowhere. Because it's "cool Britannia" and the common man is doing well for himself. People think he's a nutter and all he achieves is keeping 4-11 Tories out of power by sapping their votes
But the 2008 crash wrecks the country. UKIP builds a voter base over years, and gets an enormous share of the vote. That's a warning shot for the Tories, whose voters UKIP are sapping. They only just squeaked through a hung parliament with a Libdem coalition. Hence Gambling Dave offers a referendum to bring Europe haters back to his party so he can remain in power.
Those percentage points were already in place before Russia even got going.
Yep, working class people's lives have sucked after 2008, though it was a continuation of a longer trend and is still continuing. (And COVID made it worse. All us tech people sitting comfortable in our home office while mass wealth transfer happened out of blue collar pockets...)
Worth remembering... Anti-globalization and anti-liberalization were slogans and policies of the socialist left in the late 90s and 2000s. Battle of Seattle, Occupy, etc. Voices marginalized and mocked by the neo-liberal centrist "left" (not left) in the Democratic party, Labour party, mainstream European govt's, Canadian Liberal party, etc. Manufacturing jobs were dumped overseas, union membership declined, middle class incomes plummeted, 2008 drained people's financial well being, while housing prices skyrocketed etc. And same "moderate" forces also went to war in the middle east, etc. etc.
Obama ran on left populist slogans but actually governed from the neo-liberal centrist right.
Actual socialist left voices and formerly moderate social democratic policies generally had no voice or power in government anywhere, Corbyn was run out of the room, Bernie isolated, etc.
So it's no surprise that the right and far right saw the vacancy and exploited it. The rise of Trump, of UK Reform, etc. ties directly into this sense of hopelessness and anger people had.
Now the "conservative" right -- which was formerly pushing liberalization the strongest -- talks in angry tones about "globalism" instead of "globalization", and it's caught up with anti-Semitic dog whistles, national chauvinism, etc. etc. That shit sells.
The Russia report? It says that they didn't seek to assess Russia's impact?
Farage was basically a Putin asset, for years; I don't doubt that a lot of the sentiment was there before any influence, but to my recollection the influence was obvious and very heavy
Those two channels with limited cable availability had 0 to do with the extremely horizontal and leaderless Student List, that openly stated will do fuck all on the foreign front apart from stopping manufacturing of Israel’s drones.
Btw since you’re “doing your own research” see who supported and even better who installed the former ruling party.
Sure jan, the country with an all time low in trust for institutions and academia ruled by an strongman-loving, education-bashing fascist is secretly funding meritocracies around the world…
Just because they are academics and experts in some scientific or technical field does not mean they are immune to corruption and abuse of power. Arguably they are just are vulnerable to these things.
Serbia has been basically ruled by gangsters for the last several decades. So no, I don't think the academic environment has people like who the Serbian government has to deal with.
I've seen posts of yours on other threads, and all I have to say to you is that you keep on pretending that only the politicians you don't like are the corrupt ones; this is very naive.
I never said they were equally corrupt. What I notice quite often, especially from people that are the most partisan, is that they will add things you never said because they think they are arguing with an imaginary person constructed in their head.
I never mentioned any particular politicians and was making a general observation that if you haven't had to deal with unsavoury characters, dishonest actors and quasi-crooks, you will lack the experience of how to deal with them. These people exist in all walks of life.
The person I was replying to was playing team sports, which I find tiresome, because every post about everything has to become about Trump or whoever the current villain of the week is. It is quite frankly moronic.
There are a lot of assumptions in that general observation, right?
Not just that you need experience in order to deal with these unsavoury/dishonest/crook characters.
But that you even need to deal/compromise with them at all, that doing so would lead to a better outcome ...etc.
And also not to mix up the other meaning of "dealing with".
The biggest thing that the Student movement rallied around was dealing with previous government and various public and private sector corruption that it instigated/facilitated - in the bringing them to justice/rule of law sense.
I hope so so much that the current level of corruption will get down. They have been given an immense task. I wish them all the best. The world will be watching.
"Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today."
IMO more than the academic prowess, the key positive is that the newly elected representatives will have different priorities and perspectives, and be younger. I can’t help but thinking that young people that went through high achieving secondary studying must have internalised delayed gratification and long term thinking by necessity, and be at least trying to improve things for the longer term rather than short term gain.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
I share your hope. I, too, am aghast at the "dumbing down," and "lowest common denominator" approach of populist politics.
I would like to mention that when I was young, I figured that if young people ruled the world, then things would be much better. I was pretty sour on the bitter, cynical old farts that didn't have a stake in things, and had basically ruined our world.
Sound familiar?
After seeing what's happened in Silicon Valley, which is pretty much my "utopian dream," I have come to realize that young people can be much, much worse than "old farts."
The US was founded originally with a much narrower electorate in mind. John Adams essentially argued that people who didn't own property were too dependent on other people to be trusted with important decisions that affected the future of the country.
I think this populist race to the bottom you are describing is a symptom of voting simply being a button to press to enrich your own specific financial interests. This happens on both the left and right of the aisle.
I don't really know how to reconcile this in the current system. Elected representatives seem to be more concerned with career-making and personal enrichment than actually advocating for the people they are supposed to represent.
I'm not advocating for stripping rights, but I am a little bothered that perhaps Adams had a point. As an outsider to Serbian politics, it seems like an academic movement is perhaps an attempt at a nuanced solution to this problem.
Academia is often the path of least uncertainty; you do exams, get a student stipend, and follow a very linear path.
In some ways it's the ultimate short term thinking, taking the mediocre but predictable steps, instead of risking the real world with its unbounded upsides.
Possibly that mindset is good in a parliament, but I wouldn't really classify it as long vs short term.
Not exactly academics but as they were mentioned somewhere in this thread, physicians follow this same sort of path. It's actually a lot less uncertain than academia, it's almost impossible to screw up if you're a mediocre but somewhat bright "good" student. There were people I met in medical school who basically never had to take decisions in their life (which is sort of crazy as they take decisions about the lives of others).
Politicians are lacking in EQ, not IQ. Higher IQs would make things slightly better while higher EQ leads to much better outcomes. Ideally, yeah, both are needed.
Most politicians are high EQ. They're also mostly power hungry sociopaths.
All the worst people I've dealt with in my career were high EQ. Many were extremely successful and did significant, lasting damage to their employers and coworkers. Some were even violent, yet somehow got away with it.
What's unique in this scenario (I'm from Serbia) is that these elected guys didn't form a political movement, they weren't actively involved.
What happened is that students created a list of 250 people and vetted them.
So far they did an absolutely amazing job. There are LOT of potentially malicious actors from academia but so far looks like they did a good job at excluding them.
So those 250 people (not all of them are academics, only like half or so, maybe less) were chosen by students and they accepted.
So far, the whole movement and those people from the list haven't made a single mistake; and that's why they got 53% in election. And not ordinary election, these ones were marked by almost complete media blackout and outright lies (e.g. media claiming students are beating women, to give you an idea of what kind of lies).
Anyway, of course, we'll see.
The biggest focus right now for pretty much everyone is putting people in handcuffs, and I don't imagine much of ideological differences on that topic.
There is often resistance to technocratic forms of government that, in my opinion, misses the mark, appealing to either a "they don't understand the real world" or a "we tried this before" argument, both of which deliberately ignore the "policy is personnel", reflecting the idea that their moral character is perhaps the most defining aspect when addressing large-scale change.
It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.
I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.
But that's precisely the point of the article: that after "countrywide student protests" this group has managed to unseat "13 years of populist authoritarian rule by Aleksandar Vučić".
I'm not saying they will succeed, but they have been explicitly voted to fight the corruption you speak of.
which brings to mind the old William F. Buckley Jr., who famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.
But the idea of randomly selecting leaders as a leveling distribution is as old as Athens. We still practice it in Jury selection in much of the world.
So this experiment in Belgrade might be worth watching and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they outperform previous and regional governments.
These new batch of people are not randomly selected; they are thought of as more suitable to rule due to their being academics and scientific/technical experts, rather than lifetime politicians. Same as the old politicians who were cut from a certain cloth.
The cloth is now different, but a cloth it remains.
Knowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris. That the PHDs will be overly confident in political decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.
I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.
Looking back my guess would be that infiltration is an even bigger danger. The opportunity of visibility and power, without the hassle of climbing the ranks for decades inside an established party, attracts a certain type of human.
> fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law
Keep into account that the baseline for governing Serbia is low. As long as they can lower the corruption, they can do a lot wrong and still come out ahead.
Definitely a risk, but politicians are professionals at being overly confident. With this selection (there are not only PhDs, and not only academics), there is actually a chance of... actually trying to understand the problems?
One recurring political function of a technocratic government is for it to make difficult decisions and clean up years of rent extraction, only to step down and let the political incumbents resume extraction unbothered for another decade or so.
Romania [0] and Italy [1]'s political elites have been aptly doing it, it's no new technology. Ironically, the Serb govt that was just replaced came to power on an anti corruption reform wave itself, so this may be even more interesting to follow.
While in absolute terms things can almost always get worse.
Situation has been so bad with Vučić and his political party SNS - systematic corruption, private profiteering with iron grip on media and legislation, security services... etc.
So in that sense - even doing nothing would probably turn out better than continuing with the previous levels of intentional corruption.
And while there might be some things done by previous government that (accidentally) turned out good and are worth keeping.
For a lot of things (e.g. various institutions that lost their independence in the last ~20 years) - the rough WIP roadmap/plan can be as simple as "Undo or do the opposite from what the previous government did".
> * Everyone is quick to make judgement on something they don't know all the details of.
> [snip]
I don't know how large the HN reader base is, but at the time of writing there are 309 comments on this story. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the HN reader base is quite likely significantly larger than 309 people, presumably by several orders of magnitude. As such, the vast majority of readers ("overwhelmingly intellectuals") have indeed decided not to make a any judgement on this thing they don't know all the details of.
Comparing this parliament with a vipers den of the lying career politicians we have in the UK (exposed again during the last budget announcement) I'd say Serbia is unlikely to have it worse.
Being ruled by the career politicians is NOT an advantage, and the innumerable examples from all around the world will prove that.
That directly contradicts the Dunning-Kruger effect. In my own experience, academics are much less likely to be overconfident and are actually quite happy to admit they don't know something. The overconfident STEM people that you are talking about are in my experience engineers with bachelor's or masters degrees. Maybe biased by the online communities I frequent, but computer engineers are typically the worst IMO.
And then there’ll be the inevitable “I have to work with that person for how long!?” And the fiefdoms will be set up, and the back stabbing will begin.
That’s before we even consider the effect of the unelected bureaucracy and the power of the lobby groups and foreign interests.
Only one Serbian university barely qualifies to international rankings. Education from these institutions is not what you think it is. I'm not arguing against Serbia in particular, this applies to most Eastern and Central European countries.
Nobody takes seriously those gaming metrics. University rankings are based on how many researchers how can get to pretend they are teaching at your University...based on the extortionate funds you get from students more interested in partying at their AlphaPis.
All this while said Researchers offload the real work the students are paying for... to TAs.
I dunno man. Having worked with organisations that exist purely to coordinate academics and doctors in the medical field made up of a committee of the same folks...I only have concern. Smart as they maybe in their fields...academics are usually poor at management, logistics, empathy and organisation.
The committee of doctors, surgeons and biophysicists I supported couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery...they all had PhDs.
All groups of human organization are bad and inefficient and incompetent. Just have to pick between ones better than others. And this is better than self dealing entrenched politicians. When this one is bad they can vote them out too
In India at one point AAP had raised hopes. But they couldn’t work as a team. Let us hope Serbia shows the way for others. If they get some good advisors it might help. AAP infighting felt to me like infighting of French revolutionaries though it was not that bloody.
Quite a lot of cynicism and contempt expressed in this thread, and not entirely unjustified: historically, "governments of intellectuals" led to some of the worst regimes.
However, I want to look at this experiment more optimistically, see if this assembly can defeat the stereotype. I'll be observing its activity with interest!
I'm sure you can cherry pick overseas examples, but if you look at the progress of the US in the 1900's there's a clear pattern:
When intellectuals were in charge, or at least given authority by the politicians, things got much better. When they weren't, things got much worse. Examples include the Great Depression and (fast forwarding to the 2000's) the financial crisis, COVID (Trump fired the disease response team that stopped SARS-v1, and that would have been the early response to COVID before it left China.) He also ignored nearly-universal warnings from economists that his policies would cause the inflation that Biden was later blamed for.
On the intellectual side, we have things like the New Deal, the Apollo Program, well-run public education that led the US to be a superpower (and has now been gutted), etc, etc.
292 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 34.0 ms ] threadLots of governments just end up with career lawyers and politicians.
They can choose their advisors and their advice.
The more varied experts you can get into parliament, the more likely you have an on the record disagreement from an expert preventing a politician from choosing the incorrect advice that suits them better.
Thats not to say they are going to be any better for corruption, but in todays world there are so many deep silos that governments just completely step over and disregard.
Actually, not. They had a few left-over from when Germany had a functioning state, but the Nazis were overall fairly incompetent at actually running the country.
Either the Delusional Leftist Against AI Bro Award or the Delusional AI Bro Against Leftist Award.
But he was extremely successful as manager then. Just like the ex-NAZI NASA leader then a bit later.
That was the golden time of German management.
Hardly. But it depends on who is on board.
Corruption exists everywhere. Do you think that Vukic was less corrupt? I am pretty certain you will find many people in Serbia who want to fix the country. Other Europeans would ask: why let only poor countries join? They drain money from richer countries. Switzerland and Norway will never join and they know why. Hint: there is a reason they are rich. Second hint: they got rich without the EU.
Which country got rich with the EU? I don't know of a single one. Germany was already wealthy before the EU was founded. France is now in debt crisis from which it can not escape, so it will drag the whole EU down.
Poland and the other new members in the East, probably?
Switzerland is the opposite of a state being "without the EU".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vieta_jumping#History
In a muddled political system(democratic or otherwise) today its about power and how is it balanced. When Nandan Nilekani was creating India's UIDAI(the national aadhar system), he insisted that he would only do the project if he was given a cabinet level post[1]. His is one of the few technology examples to succeed in India when most large government run projects are a disaster. ISRO is probably another decent example of success. I think Nilekani succeeded because he had a clear moral compass and a defined goal.
But there is a problem with kings, soon they have an asshole child. Metaphorically speaking at least. UIDAI is being used stupidly enough like an SSN now and in ways it was never meant to be.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/the-i-d-man
Which is a double edged sword since then it's hard to get rid of the incompetent and corrupt people when they are deeply entrenched.
People appointed for their closeness to a party are not too likely to be competent and incorruptible
The essential factor in whether a state is good or bad for the people at large is arguably whether you can draw a clear line around which sorts of favoritism are permitted and which are outlawed as corrupt, and actually achieve enforcement when people in power inevitably break these rules. A cardiologist, bioarchaeologist and a physicist are going to know nothing about all of this. Their job is to work with the incumbent bureaucrats and elites who hold the real power in that society and those people will almost certainly run circles around them. Fantasyland Reddit politics consists of making aggressive, principled statements. Real world politics is about recognizing you have to deal with a ton of people who are quite frequently awful but because they've managed to cling to one lever of influence or another you can't ignore them. They are moving things in a the direction you don't want them to go every day so what do you do about them? Jail them? Kill them? Buy them off? Cut a deal with them? Make them see reason even though it's against their personal interest because you're just that smart? (lol!) You can't ignore them. It's nothing like the deterministic systems all these people have studied. I wish them luck but I think I know how this is gonna end.
I really hope their success carries over into governance.
There's definitely a chance of failure here.
It very much is, but I don't believe it is the skill of "solving problems" or "making society better".
Politics is about getting elected. Convincing the people that it's all the others' fault, that you know better, that you will save the world. And then when they get elected... we naively expect them to solve problems. But we selected them for their capacity at being selected, not their capacity at understanding the big problems society is facing...
The whole "you are just one vote" doesn't really apply there. As the 30th legislator on your party list, you show up and vote as you are told. And in systems like the one in the US, barring rare moments, it's also not all that different. The card that your party will abandon you, and that if you want a position of any importance you have to play ball means many a junior congressperson just votes as they are told, and spends time fundraising.
Getting elected is table stakes and shows you have the soft skills needed to organise, campaign and convince. Which is the minimum you need to get disparate groups of humans to pull in the same direction and make progress in advancing the country.
Theres no consolation if you get experts to plan solutions to problems but 1) the people you need to implement the plans have their own opinions or priorities and 2) the public want focus in some other priority and are start rioting if they don't feel heard.
You need schmoozers as much as you need tacticians.
I don't currently have any data that says otherwise and the counterfactual remains unexplored (but it will be with this parliament!), but things that people do and say to get elected often are things that if implemented...would not solve the problems the populace that elected is having.
I don't think we need schmoozers, we need people who understand the problems of their populace and have the structural power to implement their solutions. We shall see if they need more than this, but this would be the first exploration of the counterfactual.
People who have their "own" priorities don't end up upsetting the apple cart when we make success in implementing those solutions the same as their success (which if we are effective problem solvers, should be possible. See Deng Xiaoping)
A lot of the problem can be attributed to voters accepting the blame game, overly simplistic solutions, and expedient absolutist views over debating a plurality of options.
I'm not saying that the political system isn't to blame here. At least where I live, it is structured in such a way that winner takes all and loyalty to the party is more heavily rewarded than representing the constituent. But, again, that is a system that we in some sense designed.
I also don’t understand why the Pan American Highway or rail from Nome, Alaska to the tip of South America never got built. Nor can I understand why Oak Ridge, Tennessee Thorium Research Center and further development was left to rot. The Chinese are very close to throwing element 90 in our face.
They've been elected during a very special events. They know what's expected of them. Looks like compared to the previous powers this lot at least gives the country a fighting chance.
I hope more people will realize that voting for uknown politicians that offers empty promises for artificially made problems means givig up our responsibility and at the end, make things worse as we see in current democratic countries.
Imposing it top down requires oppression. Imposing or pressuring this huge layer from the bottom requires a continuously updated base so you can squeeze from the top and the bottom to enact the changes needed quickly.
It's impossible for leaders at the top, to personally vet the members of a village or city council for example.
I think I've never seen any of such concatenation of events and organization to have ever happened.
The pure ideal is to get a field expert who is good at management — but sometimes hard to attain!
The question then really becomes if — for a manager — a senior expert is better than an experienced manager who can detect exactly when to pull in the experts?
And this is probably always on a case-by-case basis: it completely depends on the circumstances, individual qualities, and supporting people around them to decide which is better for a given situation.
I believe the same holds here: the best you can get is an expert with a wide grasp of the entire field they will be active in, supported by good, smart common-sense people to manage and guide their thinking and solutioning in the right way.
It must be like a pit fight, but with connections and half truths
Most of the electorate doesn't really understand it, constantly clamoring for one or the other to be the only guiding principle, but you need both - and one has to find a way even when they appear completely irreducible. Democracy is beautiful in a very messy way, a bit like nature.
Basically, academic tenure is opposite from democracy.
It is not always obvious how to lay ground work over a decade ... or four of them.
It isn't even mostly about fixing problems. But how to make government act as an expedient rather than as an impediment.
As compared to what? A working group of 80 uneducated idiots?
If democracy doesn't work if you put smart, educated people in control then it doesn't work, period and we need to pay better attention to whatevere China is doing.
It also partially explains why they pursue are open to multiple solutions to a problem. And it certainly explains why they looked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and that thorium research and built two thorium reactors and will probably build many more because guess what?
They figured out how to make it work and apparently solved that alloy molten salt problem, it took about 10-15 years but they are on schedule. to deploy many more reactors after 2029.
They also switched or are are in the process of switching from lithium batteries to sodium ion batteries which is something else they didn’t have to do, they could hung on to lithium through 2040 milking, but instead they are moving on, which is also something that can happen when you have a bunch of engineers involved in the decision-making as opposed to those finance/MBA people who have a tendency to want to milk people for as long as possible.
https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/markets/china-emerg...
I was thinking the same.
This can either go incredibly well or it can go incredibly wrong.
Diverse? Over-educated university graduates is possibly the least diverse set of thinkers one could hope to find.
> Dozens of them come from the academic world, and more than half have a Ph.D. or M.D.
Lord help up. This is going to be demonstration of hubris and an exercise in arrogance.
At least these guys might be honest about their hubris and arrogance and won't smile to you while slaughtering your future or robbing your family.
Are you sure? After the covid and position of the scientific community on it's origin it is evident that most scientist are ready to do the exact things that corrupt career politicians are doing, but for free, purely for the love of the game.
A quick search suggests the economists associated with this movement are fairly 'mainstream' institutionalists of the type that's popular with government these days in the west. I don't think there will be big changes soon beyond dealing with corruption/nepotism.
Later on, I imagine they will push for faster EU integration on possibly slightly worse terms. Serbia may become marginally less independent in terms of fiscal policy at least and the markets might become even more exposed/beholden to foreign capital. This process has been in motion for years now and I don't expect the student movement to care - the upsides are broadly popular with younger people globally. Personally, I think it is deeply ironic that in the age of tariffs and huge government spending by the superpowers, small countries like Serbia are still signing up to be bound by the 'free market' consensus which is rapidly disintegrating globally.
She had a honors bachelors degree. An Oxford MA is awarded three years later on application, and is not an earned master’s degree. Unusually for a politician, it was a science degree (chemistry), and she worked in a lab at school and after school briefly, but sure enough she got a law degree later, which is a typical politician route.
If her bachelors degree had been in humanities like most politicians we wouldn’t call her an academic. She had science training, which is great for a change. But she wasn’t an academic.
It is absurd claim. Academia is part of real world. It is not an isolated island cut off from everything else.
It is no more divorced from real world then any other group of people. No more divorced then rural farmer are divorced from it, businessmen are divorced from it, sports fans are divorced from it. They are all having limits of understanding other groups.
Tech workers as likely more divorced from average person even.
The problem is not in that they are divorced from the real world. The problem is in the model that science get financial support, which leads to the existence of filtering that eliminates from the science anyone who is not far-left loyal dog and supporter of the "current thing".
Everything looks like a nail if you are a hammer and all that.
https://www.oglaf.com/labyrinth/
We also shouldn't forget that the vast majority of politicians today are lawyers by education. To whatever degree your assumption holds, it is true of the status quo today as well. Even in that case, having a more diverse set of "masters of one" would be an improvement.
Just like “Master” before electrician or “Captain” or “PIC” for airline pilots.
The CIA sponsored extensive studies on this and came to the conclusion that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure. It's not really surprising, and it can be seen in the US right now.
That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.
In many cases, the executives / politicians / directors just rubber stamp what a working group / committee has decided.
Also, see the Tomato guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUBdX1d3ok
One of the ways they made this work was by assigning temporary powers to elected/appointed individuals appropriate and sufficient to get their job done, whether that was provincial governor, tribunus plebis, consul or whatever. A notable title was that of "dictator" (where the modern word derives from) which gave sweeping temporary powers to a general sufficient to execute a war.
Julius Caesar famously abused this system, effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator), although that did not end well for him. His successor, Augustus (whose adopted name later became the name of the office of emperor) initiated a more acceptable version of this by simultaneously holding multiple "elected" positions thereby having the power of them all.
If you don't count the 80 years of off and on civil wars and political and social upheavals.
> and sufficient to get their job done
Well they were extremely successful military, internal politics were a mixed bag and it slowly turned into chaos and constant gridlock as soon as they ran out of external enemies to fight.
Rome had an arcane deeply adversarial political system which basically relied different powerful men in the elite competing and keeping each other in check while trying to amass as much wealth and political power they could get away with (Ceasar was hardly an aberration besides just being way more successful than countless aristocrats playing the same game).
> effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator),
Ever heard of Sula?
This became more centralized over time and as it did more executive power was needed at the top level. Augustus centralized the army under state control. Emperors in the late empire had nearly dictatorial authority and a massive state bureaucracy under their control.
But I do find it hilarious that apparently everyone assumes it to be the former, and that is quite telling about how most of this site's visitors think the other visitors of this site look at the world.
Academics don't have a great track record in politics or governance pretty much anywhere at anytime in history.
Most surveys, either of experts or the public, rank Wilson above average.
Worst are generally Buchanan, Johnson, Harding and of course Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_preside...
All these people have been been at the forefront of b ringin freedom, democracy, and well being to their populations. If anything, the "fun facts" show that academics can make great leaders.
In Germany the focus is usually on the parties and not the figurehead for over 70 years now.
edit: for the election
Yeah, the thing that really strikes me is that their movement _did not exist_ in the last election. Went from scratch to power in three years. Whatever you want to say about their politics or their ability to lead...sure. But that's an incredible thing to do.
He clearly redirected the railway station maintenance budget to his friends instead, because he assumed the public were suckers who'd vote him back in no matter how badly he fucked up. Then the station canopy collapsed and killed people. Entirely avoidable.
When your leaders are nakedly corrupt, and through sheer luck you still have free and fair elections, you vote those fuckers out. Otherwise they'll fiddle while your country burns.
It looks like the public want someone else in charge, they'll give them a fair shake. Maybe the new lot will direct the treasure more appropriately.
Hungary has this problem by the way - people thought Péter Magyar will fix, and change, Hungary. Recently Hungary signed a "we are ultra-right servants of Trump" in the USA (see https://telex.hu/english/2026/10/30/hungarian-fm-and-rubio-s...), thus validating all those who pointed out that Peter is just a younger face but the same Orban 2.0 in the end.
Corruption runs very, very deep. I am also certain the Epstein network is not only much bigger than known, but has different actors and beneficiaries. To this day the US court system can not explain why only Maxwell is in prison. That makes logically - and logistically - no sense at all.
Proper up to the point. No way he is giving up built in advantages right wing has in Hungary - like rural voters votes having way more power then city voters.
What will happen here will strongly depend on how good these people are at actually playing the game of politics. I don't have any particular reason to be more or less optimistic than any regular slate of politicians.
It's entirly possible that the experiment fails because of politics, but it's also possible that the amount of politics is simply lower because people are simply more reasonable.
The last part will come down to vested interest and ideologues.
So, it'd be a big step up if we had leaders that understood basic elementary school stuff stuff like bleach injections are not medicine (vs Trump), or that draining the California delta would be an ecological disaster (vs Newsom - https://stopthetunnels.org/).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50300051
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5lwZU7Q5U0
with the move a likely an attempt to distance US involvement in the media network;It was my fellow countrymen, and their long held Eurosceptic views, that fucked us. Russia posting divisive pish in 2016 has nothing on our decades of native politicians and newspapers blaming Brussels for everything bad (often its their own policies being policywashed) and pretending everything good came from them.
Do you wonder why there even was a referendum?
Compare 1997: Sir Jammy Fishpaste hates Europe, spends millions of his own money promoting his Referendum Party, gets nowhere. Because it's "cool Britannia" and the common man is doing well for himself. People think he's a nutter and all he achieves is keeping 4-11 Tories out of power by sapping their votes
But the 2008 crash wrecks the country. UKIP builds a voter base over years, and gets an enormous share of the vote. That's a warning shot for the Tories, whose voters UKIP are sapping. They only just squeaked through a hung parliament with a Libdem coalition. Hence Gambling Dave offers a referendum to bring Europe haters back to his party so he can remain in power.
Those percentage points were already in place before Russia even got going.
Worth remembering... Anti-globalization and anti-liberalization were slogans and policies of the socialist left in the late 90s and 2000s. Battle of Seattle, Occupy, etc. Voices marginalized and mocked by the neo-liberal centrist "left" (not left) in the Democratic party, Labour party, mainstream European govt's, Canadian Liberal party, etc. Manufacturing jobs were dumped overseas, union membership declined, middle class incomes plummeted, 2008 drained people's financial well being, while housing prices skyrocketed etc. And same "moderate" forces also went to war in the middle east, etc. etc.
Obama ran on left populist slogans but actually governed from the neo-liberal centrist right.
Actual socialist left voices and formerly moderate social democratic policies generally had no voice or power in government anywhere, Corbyn was run out of the room, Bernie isolated, etc.
So it's no surprise that the right and far right saw the vacancy and exploited it. The rise of Trump, of UK Reform, etc. ties directly into this sense of hopelessness and anger people had.
Now the "conservative" right -- which was formerly pushing liberalization the strongest -- talks in angry tones about "globalism" instead of "globalization", and it's caught up with anti-Semitic dog whistles, national chauvinism, etc. etc. That shit sells.
Farage was basically a Putin asset, for years; I don't doubt that a lot of the sentiment was there before any influence, but to my recollection the influence was obvious and very heavy
Or are you simply reproducing a regime’s narrative on here?
It is doubtful he is pro-Russian, but he is surely anti-US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNL4xoD5uMYI never mentioned any particular politicians and was making a general observation that if you haven't had to deal with unsavoury characters, dishonest actors and quasi-crooks, you will lack the experience of how to deal with them. These people exist in all walks of life.
The person I was replying to was playing team sports, which I find tiresome, because every post about everything has to become about Trump or whoever the current villain of the week is. It is quite frankly moronic.
The whole thread started with you pointing at specific group and claiming they are nore vulnerable to corruption.
Not just that you need experience in order to deal with these unsavoury/dishonest/crook characters.
But that you even need to deal/compromise with them at all, that doing so would lead to a better outcome ...etc.
And also not to mix up the other meaning of "dealing with".
The biggest thing that the Student movement rallied around was dealing with previous government and various public and private sector corruption that it instigated/facilitated - in the bringing them to justice/rule of law sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5F1vfgA6XI
I wonder why hasn't Google banned this guy's channel.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
Hopefully the Serbian youths learned from them.
I would like to mention that when I was young, I figured that if young people ruled the world, then things would be much better. I was pretty sour on the bitter, cynical old farts that didn't have a stake in things, and had basically ruined our world.
Sound familiar?
After seeing what's happened in Silicon Valley, which is pretty much my "utopian dream," I have come to realize that young people can be much, much worse than "old farts."
Maximilien Robespierre was an intellectual.
I think this populist race to the bottom you are describing is a symptom of voting simply being a button to press to enrich your own specific financial interests. This happens on both the left and right of the aisle.
I don't really know how to reconcile this in the current system. Elected representatives seem to be more concerned with career-making and personal enrichment than actually advocating for the people they are supposed to represent.
I'm not advocating for stripping rights, but I am a little bothered that perhaps Adams had a point. As an outsider to Serbian politics, it seems like an academic movement is perhaps an attempt at a nuanced solution to this problem.
In some ways it's the ultimate short term thinking, taking the mediocre but predictable steps, instead of risking the real world with its unbounded upsides.
Possibly that mindset is good in a parliament, but I wouldn't really classify it as long vs short term.
Ha! <knee slap> <snort!> Good one!
vs electing lawyers as done in other countries.
All the worst people I've dealt with in my career were high EQ. Many were extremely successful and did significant, lasting damage to their employers and coworkers. Some were even violent, yet somehow got away with it.
Yes, very STEM oriented indeed.
What happened is that students created a list of 250 people and vetted them.
So far they did an absolutely amazing job. There are LOT of potentially malicious actors from academia but so far looks like they did a good job at excluding them.
So those 250 people (not all of them are academics, only like half or so, maybe less) were chosen by students and they accepted.
So far, the whole movement and those people from the list haven't made a single mistake; and that's why they got 53% in election. And not ordinary election, these ones were marked by almost complete media blackout and outright lies (e.g. media claiming students are beating women, to give you an idea of what kind of lies).
Anyway, of course, we'll see.
The biggest focus right now for pretty much everyone is putting people in handcuffs, and I don't imagine much of ideological differences on that topic.
It is clear from populist approaches that conducting business-as-usual without any foundational knowledge is dangerous and leads to corruption and regulatory capture, and it is equally true that purely rationalist efforts neglect the messy nature of political governance and social complexity, leading to an overly narrow idea that ends up not serving the people it claims to support.
I expect that this government will rise or fall based on its ability to remain internally cohesive while also trying to resist (and hopefully influence) the many pressures that will be put on it by the regional and global vested interests.
I'm not saying they will succeed, but they have been explicitly voted to fight the corruption you speak of.
But the idea of randomly selecting leaders as a leveling distribution is as old as Athens. We still practice it in Jury selection in much of the world.
So this experiment in Belgrade might be worth watching and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they outperform previous and regional governments.
These new batch of people are not randomly selected; they are thought of as more suitable to rule due to their being academics and scientific/technical experts, rather than lifetime politicians. Same as the old politicians who were cut from a certain cloth.
The cloth is now different, but a cloth it remains.
I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.
Keep into account that the baseline for governing Serbia is low. As long as they can lower the corruption, they can do a lot wrong and still come out ahead.
Definitely a risk, but politicians are professionals at being overly confident. With this selection (there are not only PhDs, and not only academics), there is actually a chance of... actually trying to understand the problems?
Romania [0] and Italy [1]'s political elites have been aptly doing it, it's no new technology. Ironically, the Serb govt that was just replaced came to power on an anti corruption reform wave itself, so this may be even more interesting to follow.
[0] Ciolos govt
[1] Monti, Ciampi
It's a pity this disclaimer cannot be made to serve as a header for about 99% of the comments here today, because, holy shit...
* Everyone is quick to make judgement on something they don't know all the details of.
* There's not much agreement - mostly people disagreeing with each other.
* Everyone's opinion is important - they're smart so obviously, they're always right.
* Unrelated politics - my pet issue must be talked about.
* Anything is better - it's impossible for things to get worse.
* I disagree with this opinion so it must be a Russian bot.
Anyway, I wonder what will happen if you get together a bunch of intellectuals in government.
Situation has been so bad with Vučić and his political party SNS - systematic corruption, private profiteering with iron grip on media and legislation, security services... etc.
So in that sense - even doing nothing would probably turn out better than continuing with the previous levels of intentional corruption.
And while there might be some things done by previous government that (accidentally) turned out good and are worth keeping.
For a lot of things (e.g. various institutions that lost their independence in the last ~20 years) - the rough WIP roadmap/plan can be as simple as "Undo or do the opposite from what the previous government did".
I don't know how large the HN reader base is, but at the time of writing there are 309 comments on this story. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the HN reader base is quite likely significantly larger than 309 people, presumably by several orders of magnitude. As such, the vast majority of readers ("overwhelmingly intellectuals") have indeed decided not to make a any judgement on this thing they don't know all the details of.
Being ruled by the career politicians is NOT an advantage, and the innumerable examples from all around the world will prove that.
And then there’ll be the inevitable “I have to work with that person for how long!?” And the fiefdoms will be set up, and the back stabbing will begin.
That’s before we even consider the effect of the unelected bureaucracy and the power of the lobby groups and foreign interests.
All this while said Researchers offload the real work the students are paying for... to TAs.
The committee of doctors, surgeons and biophysicists I supported couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery...they all had PhDs.
I hope they are confident enough to reach out to people who can help them in matters where not smarts but experience is needed.
However, I want to look at this experiment more optimistically, see if this assembly can defeat the stereotype. I'll be observing its activity with interest!
When intellectuals were in charge, or at least given authority by the politicians, things got much better. When they weren't, things got much worse. Examples include the Great Depression and (fast forwarding to the 2000's) the financial crisis, COVID (Trump fired the disease response team that stopped SARS-v1, and that would have been the early response to COVID before it left China.) He also ignored nearly-universal warnings from economists that his policies would cause the inflation that Biden was later blamed for.
On the intellectual side, we have things like the New Deal, the Apollo Program, well-run public education that led the US to be a superpower (and has now been gutted), etc, etc.