by ben_w | 2025-10-08 23:10:10+00:00
> > (1) The comment you're replying said they were "fast".

> I actually did address this. It is my opening paragraph

This opening paragraph?

I find this and similar claims quite astounding. The last few hundred years seems to have been some of the most productive times for humanity. The great technological leaps forward. In that time we went from an agricultural society where many were malnourished, illiterate, and life expectancy was far lower (not only was the child mortality rate magnitudes higher but expectancy past 60 years old was abysmal) to a society that put a god damn man on the moon and maybe more importantly a toilet in every home.

In isolation, it's about speed.

But then you followed it with:

All that happened under democracy.

Which suggests that you intended the first paragraph to be about comparing free nations to dictatorships and not acknowledging that the dictatorships, which also did those things, were also fast — in fact, faster. But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516066

> I also addressed this, in my second to last paragraph

This one?

This is not to say that democracies have not also caused great harm. One needs not believe there is a global optimal solution to such a complex problem, but that does not mean certain solutions aren't strictly better than others. A benefit to democracies is that it is difficult to bury the mistakes. They say history is told by the victors but that's not entirely true. History is written by those who write and the writings that can be preserved. In democracies this is available to far more people. It is unlikely that you have an accurate understanding of the daily lives of those who lived more than a few hundred years ago. No one was recording that.

If so, not the point I was making here.

95% of businesses fail. How transparent are those failures? Generally not, which also leads to people making predictable mistakes like investing in bubbles.

> 2) it's much easier to play catchup than lead.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516066

> (You should also consider that information is distributed differently. As we've previously discussed and others mentioned. While in the US all our atrocities are out in the open, this is not true for autocracies. 64 (Deng was in power at that time) is a much more taboo topic than say, the Trail of Tears. In America we're quite self aware but even forget that our northern neighbors did something similar, but worse. But Canada isn't even trying that hard to hide those things. Even a much more open country like Japan is not so open about things like their invasion into China and Korea during WW2. You're aware that you should be careful in interpreting history of America as told by America, but such care must also be given when reading about others. Propaganda isn't uniquely American and we're not even that good at it)

I could ramble on for a long time about how I think national self-images differ from reality, to the cost of those living in them, but I don't think it would add much over noting the current weaponisation of the word "woke" by those who want to deny all historical mistakes, and before that having grown up in the UK with "it's political correctness gone mad", and the UK's political classes' differing reactions to the destruction of two statues dedicated to two different philanthropists — one of whom was a slave trader (apparently we should be sad about the destruction of that statue), the other was Jimmy Savile (where the destruction of the statue was met with broad agreement).

Also as a Brit, lots of us have absolutely no idea why most or all of our former colonies might not like us.

> If given odds like that, which would you prefer?

In this hypothetical, am I in the aristocracy or in the working class?

If a citizen, you're still missing my point entirely, and I think the parent point too.

Illustration of why: same question but of corporations, workers vs. shareholders (the equivalent of aristocrats). What the people with the money want has very little in common with the interests of those at the (metaphorical or literal) coal front.

Move fast and break [things | laws | treaties | people]. Sucks to be the one who gets broken. Sucks more when it's broken fast. The point is, and only is, that it's fast.