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Technocrat.net Shut Down
twitter writes "Bruce Perens has pulled the plug on Technocrat.net. 'The technocrat.net public discussion site is shut down. This has happened because the site never achieved the ability to financially sustain its editorial staff and system expenses with its revenues. When it became evident that Technocrat was un-viable as a business, I found that I did not wish to keep supporting the site as a hobby. Certain elements of the community that developed here, unfortunately, creep me out. At the end I faced the decision of asking for donations to keep the site running, or letting it die, and it became clear to me that I'd feel better if it would just die. I am very busy building a new software business, with some great new (and yet unannounced) Open Source software in development. I must focus on that for now. Best holiday wishes to you all.'"
happy New Year to you too. Pity I missed out on the creepy community. Never heard of that forum. Just as well that is gone then.
Dennis Onstenk
What is?
I enjoyed technocrat while it lasted. I got to understand a lot about americans and how they think. Especially those who don't share my "european liberal views" have been very interesting to communicate with.
I think that I've learned a lot about human cultures from technocrat. Sad to see it go.
And I hope I'm not one of the ones that creep Bruce out. ;-)
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
January 04, 2001 (8:00:00 AM) - 7 years, 11 months ago
I am not familiar with the community at Technocrat or the site itself for that matter. Anyone care to elaborate?
Typically, announcemet about shutting a site down would have more of a "we had a good ride, and the great atmosphere of the site will be missed" tone to it. Here, we have quite the opposite, and nosy personalities will surely want to know the dirty details...
(Apart from the obvious ones,such as the internet being full of a*holes)
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
What do does this rant based on strawman arguments has to do with Technocrat.net?
It's been my experience that reading too much into an implied tone in the slashdot summaries just gets me in trouble, so in brief:
Thanks, Bruce, for your efforts and contributions over the years and may your next project(s) be successful and fulfilling.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/technocrat.net
come on slashdot, slow news day?
Hosting services with essentially unlimited bandwidth can cost as little as $5 per month. I use ixwebhosting myself for a hobby site, but I don't feel the need to ask for donations from my audience to support it, since it barely costs me more than a couple of cups of coffee a month. I assume he needs no staff, and since the code is written the site would be essentially self-maintaining. And if the traffic became too much for a cheap hosting service, then it would be high enough for ad support. I'm sure he has his perfectly valid reasons for shutting it down. Maybe he doesn't want to spend time moderating a site he is no longer interested in, for example. But it seems odd to imply that one of them is that he is unable to afford to run it as a hobby without donations.
(BTW I was a technocrat subscriber, although I posted very rarely. There were certain seemingly self-important posters, who I'll leave nameless, whose long rambles I just ignored. Other topics were often interesting, though, somewhat like /. but a little broader in scope,
and I monitored the RSS feed every day or two.)
Has Netcraft confirmed this??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
"neverheardofit" would be a good tag for this article. It could be just me, but I've been reading tech news sites for a few years now and haven't heard of this one...
I think most will be confused with the much more popular site Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/). I thought I heard of this web site, until I remembered that it was actually this one I've heard of.
speaking as a relatively frequent poster: wtf?
i like Bruce, but this is very poorly done. if the primary concern is financial, there's ways to mitigate that. if he wasn't happy asking for donations (which i can certainly respect, even if i wouldn't have that problem myself), you can look at both revenue and expenses independent of that. on expenses: it's never been clear to me what the "professional editorial staff" actually did, besides stick a comment on some stories - a comment which wasn't reliably better than any other on the site. for revenue, using the ad hoc advertising was also probably a poor choice compared to using something like google's service. and if the issues was primarily the creepy community, there's ways to deal with that, too: moderation systems, or even (at the size it's at) just kickban individual users (after talking to and/or warning them).
and if you've given up on all that, the shutdown itself was not well done. no notice? that's kinda disrespectful to the people who've put in work to build what's there. i would've loved a few days to copy some of the comments i've made there, or links others have posted, or discuss where to go from here. and that last one, of course, could have included handing the community - or even the site, wholesale - off to another host. that last part in particular stings; it kinda feels like "if i can't have it - on my terms - nobody can".
Bruce, if you're out there, look: thanks for all the work you've done. it was great. i'd really like to keep it going. let me know if we can talk about options.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Out of all the self-proclaimed open source leaders, Bruce Perens creeps me out the most. I really don't know why people follow him. Everything he touches is lackluster at best.
Others like Stallman (GNU) and ESR (CatB) have caused major philosophical movements. The same can't be said for Perens.
I see Perens to Linux as Sean Hannity is to Conservatism. He's there and not afraid to pipe up. But he really hasn't offered any original ideas that have been worth much.
There were a few people there that I liked, because they showed that they put thought into their commentary. Their logic was sound, even if I disagreed with them.
One writer seems to have attempted to make the site his personal Blogging page.
I stopped going there around October because Bruce felt the need to put banner adverts up for the Obama campaign. I don't go to "Geek sites" for political adverts.
At least this way, Bruce will be able to focus his energies on more interesting projects.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Hi Folks. Well, a lot of you seem to be disappointed about the site shutting down, and several people have offered to keep it going. I've turned down those offers. Technocrat was intended to get technology experts (us) involved in technology policy. It didn't succeed in that, although it was a good discussion site. The goal of getting people involved in tech policy is still a good one.
Thus, Technocrat will be re-launched with a new format. It will not be a discussion site any longer. Instead, it will offer tech stories and legislation alerts to be syndicated by other web sites, including discussion sites. There will also be some other features that I'll keep quiet about until the new site is on the air.
The goal is still to get more technology experts involved in setting technology policy.
Thanks
Bruce
That new format was slashcode, but looking at the most recent archives, he was only getting a couple posts per story (prolly mostly from twitter). Of course, slashcode's moderation system exists to try to separate the cream from the milk, but at the volumes he was getting, it was all just yogurt. To bad, though.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
In the interest of living a life a certain good book suggests (turning the other cheek), most of the people who donated to Bruce's site were Novell employees.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Ya'all creepy! I'm going to go over here now! Merry Christmas!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I, too, was never a user of Technocrat. (As many of us on Slashdot as are saying the same, no wonder it wasn't self-sustaining as a business model!)
But it sounds like I web site I would have enjoyed, actually.
I think you bring up a really interesting point about people tending to become more "vocal and extreme" in their opinions when faced with adversity in their personal lives. If I look in the mirror, I realize I spent more time on the net ranting about political issues while I was going through a divorce. I'm not sure if I was saying more "extreme" things than I really believed though? Possibly ... but I think it was more a matter of wanting to get things off my chest. Ideas of mine I may have "watered down" otherwise, in the interest of promoting a more open discussion, I probably tended to speak "exactly as I felt" instead.
In any case though, you can find plenty of places to voice opinions on the Internet. If you want to be verbal about it, you can podcast or create a series of youtube videos. More often, it's put in writing, anyplace from blogs to Slashdot or ArsTechnica, or even anonymous Craigslist forums.
The problem is, most of those places either let you control the direction of the whole discussion (such as making your own podcast or blog), or the political commentary is secondary to the overall "theme" of the site (such as Technology and Science themed web sites where it always creeps in).
Technocrat sounds like the entire theme WAS political discussion, and let's face it - politics is ugly. So I can see how the site would have some "disturbing qualities" to it. It comes with that territory.
"Soviet Russia achieved more under Stalin in 10 years than what took most of the Western hemisphere a century."
What, 20 million dead Russians?
Some archival researchers have estimated the number of victims of Stalin's repressions to be 4 million in total or less, others believe the number to be considerably higher.Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million - a total of about 9 million victims of repression.
Some have also included the 6 to 8 million victims of the 1932-1933 famine as victims of repression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks or simply an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization.
Certainly, it appears a minimum of around 10 million surplus deaths--4 million by repression and 6 million from famine -- are attributable to the regime, with a number of recent books suggesting a likely total of around 20 million.Adding 6-8 million famine victims to Erlikman's estimates above, for example, would yield a total of between 15 and 17 million victims. Researcher Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million.Others continue to maintain their earlier much higher estimates are correct.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Is Bruce Perens even relevant anymore?
He seems like the Jessie Jackson of FOSS...
If you read your history there's a period from ~1910-1940 or so when the Soviets were far and away accomplishing more than the west: they built up modern roads and water systems and electrified their nations over that period, while the west dragged its heels and fell into the great depression.
They never really recovered from losing ~15m lives in WWII.
Bringing up the body count is certainly a fair critique, but you have to have some kind of blinders on to think it's in any way a uniquely soviet thing: if you include "surplus" deaths over all of American history, you have to bring in the entire native population of the content, who somehow dwindled from 20-100m in 1776 to 1m today, with almost all such deaths directly attributable to American actions (both public and private) over a 100 year period.
Clearing out space for a new economic system and society is always messy, and it's not exactly intellectually honest to start your timeline from well after the time you guys wrapped up your mass extermination of inconvenient peoples.
Stallman's philosophy, of which Perens is a supper and not just a fan, is anti-business.
I'm sorry that Stallman's philosophy hurts your religious feelings, but it's just a philosophy. Get a life.
If the site has been up for 8 or more years, there's got to be some interesting stuff there. My question includes, as a lot of people here: How do I learn more about it? (since I haven't heard of it before), and especially if there are "creepy" things... is the wayback machine the only saviour, or is he going to tgz the site and put it on BitTorrent? I don't even see a mention in Wikipedia...
8-PP
In anycase "it's just a philosophy" is an illogical response. Marxism could be called 'just a philosophy', but equally with Stallman's position it causes human misery and removes human satisfactions by contradicting your nature.
I merely point this matters out for your information, since I am not affected by them in anyway, so that you may live long and prosper.
I am reminded eerily of moot's attempts to distance himself from his own creation, 4chan. in fact, the two communities were eerily similar.
GFA/M/S d-- s: a--- C++++ UBL++$ P+ L+++ !E- W++ N+ !o K- w--- !O !M !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP+ t+++ 5- X+ R tv@ b++ DI++++ D+ G
Marxism could be called 'just a philosophy', but equally with Stallman's position it causes human misery and removes human satisfactions by contradicting your nature.
That is even more true for economic determinism.
Why the hell would you want to smell concentrated trolls? Can you imagine the last time they left their computers? I mean, gawds, my eyes BURN thinking about it! :p
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Doubtless you are right, which is why I am a libertarian and reckon the market is the natural way.
I am a libertarian and reckon the market is the natural way.
I'm a libertarian too, but I'm not sure I'd describe the market as "natural", as such. From what I can see in history, kleptocracies and tyrannies are far more common, and freedom requires considerable effort to establish and maintain it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's difficult to imagine Technocrat as anything other than "Bruce Perens' blog." All this time he has claimed it was a more grown-up version of Slashdot, but then you go there and find that it's mainly his own political soapbox. I want to read about the latest chips and dips, not about how Obama's flatulence is the cure for global warming. Seriously, what does he expect? That's not the formula for success. Either call it what it is or take it down.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Bruce Perens was well-known in the open source community as the project leader of Debian and for founding the Open Source Initiative (and creating the Open Source Definition) long before his 2-year stint at HP.
and i don't recall Perens or any other open source leader ever claiming that Linux was a 'sure thing.' though pretty much every major system vendor (HP, Lenovo, IBM, Dell, Apple, etc.) today has a Linux division or is involved with FOSS in some way--a situation which Perens has played no small part in creating.
Take a look at your options on this special comment configuration page hidden in the guts of the preferences pages (actually it's in the Help pages):
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
That link should take you straight to it.
But even after you sort those issues out, the user pages are still a useless maelstrom of wasted space. The old user pages were just plain better, I don't see a single improvement on the new user page. In fact I don't see anything that hasn't been thoroughly screwed up. One good idea I did get is that in a user page like the old one, it could be handy to show articles you've tagged with the tag you used...I think that was the intention of showing every article you've tagged in the "garbagefall" on the new user page, but it just shows all the tags on the article.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They went from a peasant economy similar to what you see in large parts of Africa today to something vaguely resembling a civilised country. It took Britain about 150 years to achieve something a little bit better using free market techniques.
Soviet Russia achieved more under Stalin in 10 years than what took most of the Western hemisphere a century.
Not that hard when you're two centuries behind the rest of the world to begin with. He was playing catch-up, the rest of the world having already done the much of the scientific discovery legwork, and even then never achieved any sort of parity. Granted, organizing a giant country full of ignorant feudalism-era peasants and dragging them kicking and screaming through the industrial revolution is no mean feat, but it was largely just a matter of shooting enough recalcitrant people to get the rest moving, and it was Lenin and Trotsky which did the job of putting those guns in Stalin's hands.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I don't see how a failed discussion site about general technology has anything to do with "failing with Linux." I went to his site a few times, but found that it was missing a sort of critical mass that is necessary to make it an interesting discussion.
Yes, I know I'm feeding the trolls. They just look so cute and I'm still in the holiday spirit, I guess.
> strongly statically typed languages like Perl
Wow, it's been ages since I looked at Perl --- I know that Larry said that Perl 6 would be revolutionary, but I didn't think he'd go that far!
You're lucky you don't owe me a keyboard, mate... LOL
Liberalism, the People, etc. is deconstruction and places power in the hands of those who are most easily fooled.
You fail it.
Wait, so because I'm a GNU/FSF True Believer I have to eat Bruce Perens for supper? Well, worse things have been done in the name of freedom.....
BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIINNSSS!!!!!
Nick
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is probably pretty easy to make the sort of argument you are making the style in which you have made it. When you start off with a exclusionary qualification of opinion and then follow up with redefining an indefinite group under your own terms there is little anyone can say to disagree. Since there is no big "L" liberal group which has a definitive stance on any of the topics you've mentioned you can define it however you want and then easily attack the straw man which you've created. I think you've named your straw man "they."
Perhaps if your arguments have real merit, in the future you can elucidate upon them in a way where you are able to define specifically the group which you are attacking and then point out, by specific example, the flaws in their position and/or method.
Maybe I've succumbed to a troll here, but I feel generous in the spirit of the winter holidays and would rather put my effort towards elevating the quality of this type of discussion.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
However, the R&D was already mostly done. Russia knew which directions to go and which to avoid as they could learn from others. It's similar to research - one team develops a new theory with years of work; afterwards others need only a miniscule fraction of that time to extract knowledge about the topic from the paper.
The USSR did rapidly "upgrade" themselves but then again that's something Germany did in the Fifties as well - it's easy to do with determination, control, money and a blank slate. And, especially, prior knowledge of what to do.
The impressive R&D part was the Space Race (and, less awesome, the nuclear arms race), where the USA and the USSR had their best minds competing with each other over a field neither had much prior knowledge about.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
When you start off with a exclusionary qualification of opinion and then follow up with redefining an indefinite group under your own terms there is little anyone can say to disagree. Since there is no big "L" liberal group which has a definitive stance on any of the topics you've mentioned you can define it however you want and then easily attack the straw man which you've created. I think you've named your straw man "they."
In lower forms of Political Science, we generally lay out a "political spectrum" with liberals on the left and conservatives on the right. We put Democrats left, and Republicans right. To the left of Democrats we put Socialists, Communists, etc; to the right of Republicans we put Libertarians and Fascists.
In higher forms of Political Science, the sides often reverse, or become something similar but slightly different, perhaps centered elsewhere; the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have very context-sensitive definitions. "Liberals" in other countries follow what we consider "Moderate" political views here, while some countries standard "Moderate" views would seem very "Liberal" to us (the UK for example).
Classically, in most models, "Conservatives" want to minimize government regulation and involvement; while "Liberals" want to maximize it, regulate business, and do all "for the people" that they can-- as far as telling businesses who they have to hire, what they should/must make (see France), to go as far as taking peoples' insurance away and instead forcing their own insurance on them at cost in taxes (see socialized healthcare).
The GGP's post described Liberalism as placing power to decide in the hands of the people, rather than organizing it at the core government. That's not true here.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
1. Lifetime achievement:
Honorable mention: joels
2. Collective efforts:
(feel free to expand this list)
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
somebody want to mention what Perens site used to be about? Something OTHER than trolling, I assume was the original intention?
Given that Perens was one of the primary instigators of what I refer to as "Novell trolling", over the Novell/Microsoft deal, I'm not sure he has any business complaining about trolls.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
A market is simply a place of exchange which would happen between any two farmers or hunters where one has something the other does not. It's more natural than pie. And more common than tyranny.
The number of deaths that actually can be attributed to Stalin's politically motivated persecution is about 2 millions over the whole time he was in power -- that includes executions, .
The figures that people see published and re-published now, are mostly taken from three sources:
1. Famine deaths in 30's (at worst they are an evidence of incompetence while handling severe drought).
2. Numbers A. Solzhenitsyn mentioned in GULAG Archipelago (that reflect nothing but strength of Solzhenitsyn's hatred for the government that unfairly imprisoned him)
3. Various "estimates" made by American historians and propaganda workers as a replacement for total lack of information they had.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Actually, this is exactly backwards when you look at history prior to, say, 1840ish. Liberals were people who wanted to maximize liberty (individualistic personal freedom) for the sake of individual happiness and prosperity, and Conservatives were people who wanted centralized power (divinely-appointed kings) because it appealed to their aesthetic craving for orderliness and organization. In US history, the split was perhaps best exemplified by the wide gulf between far-Left Jefferson and far-Right Hamilton.
Then around the mid-1800s, things flipped around when a number of thinkers (most notably Karl Marx) decided that the goals of Liberalism (maximum individual happiness and prosperity) could be achieved through the mechanisms of Conservatism (centralized power), and that since centralized power seemed much more "efficient" it should therefore be implemented. (Donald Knuth's comment that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is apt here.)
The proper Liberal-Conservative spectrum, viewed from that pre-Marx perspective, thus has Classical Liberalism on the far Left, Monarchy on the far Right, and both Fascism and Communism on the far Right just slightly left of Monarchy (with the famed Communism/Fascism mutual hatred stemming from professional jealousy and egoism nearly as much as from actual ideological divides, not much different from the internecine Communist hatreds like Stalinism/Trotskyism and Stalinism/Maoism).
Against this scale, the US Democratic Party is rather ill-defined: most are in a fuzzy mass toward the middle, with some straying far left or right. FDR, today cheered/vilified as a paragon of the Left, was actually a Right-winger who was only a step away from Fascism. If you actually look at what was said during the 1930s, he lavishly praised Mussolini and favored big business interests in the New Deal. He actually had the balls to say that competition was a bad thing, and encouraged industrial consolidation into monopolies. Big businesses were actually major FDR supporters, while small entrepreneurs were squashed as he neutered antitrust laws and increased barriers to entry.
The US Republican Party, in contrast with the Democrats, is divided into three clearly defined and strikingly different camps: the "Social Conservatives" at the far right, who think that the whole democracy thing is overrated and would be content to return to divine kingship (so long as said king was appointed by the correct religion, i.e. theirs); the "Neoliberals" and "Fiscal Conservatives", who despite lip service toward laissez faire principles are actually somewhere in the middle not far from the Democrats (the principle difference being which industries they favor); and the tiny handful of libertarians, Ron Paul now being the default example, who are actually farther left than most Democrats but foolishly think of themselves as "Conservatives" and "right-wingers".
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
This reminds me of the forum at ornery (http://ornery.org/), one of Orson Scott Card's sites. Pretty much everybody there thinks OSC is a nut and isn't shy of saying so, and still the guy keeps footing the bill and AFAIK has never interfered with the forum. We're not talking about a few people, the forum is pretty damn big and reasonably well known.
(As for _why_ they think that about him, that's a different discussion. Suffices to say he's always been openly pro-Bush.)
i know replying to yourself is bad form, but i forgot to link to this video of Bruce Perens talking about how he got started with Linux & FOSS (he once worked at Pixar) and why he continues to be involved. i think the video provides some great insight into the kind of person Bruce is and the mentality a lot of FOSS authors/contributors share.
It's not that talk radio uses that term quite a bit, rather it's not theirs to claim. It existed before Hannity and Limbaugh used it as a derogatory term for "left leaning" media.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
With the decline of Usenet and and the rise of a huge heterogeneous, chaotic and tangled network of Web "Forums" to take its place we have a problem :
The loss of any standardized search capability, no consistent archiving mechanism, the necessity that one have a separate profile password and username etc. for each forum, no standard interchange format,(eg. different posting, editing, and formatting rules) and a jumbled mass of different rules, Terms of Service, and copyright policies.
I submitted a story which asked the question of how this problem might be addressed, but it was rejected unfortunately. Nonetheless there needs to be a discussion on this matter in the Internet standards community. Excepting the voluntary adoption of OpenID, I haven't seen any other solutions to these problems proposed, and now they are starting to bite us.
Usenet is dead. Long live Usenet.
jdb2
Wait - was that a troll created by a Perl script? I think the dig on Python is what gives it away.
Then around the mid-1800s, things flipped around when a number of thinkers (most notably Karl Marx) decided that the goals of Liberalism (maximum individual happiness and prosperity) could be achieved through the mechanisms of Conservatism (centralized power)
I always thought (from, you know, reading his work) that Marx was big on the dismantling of the state. His view of the final state of socialism was quite anarchistic, in fact. The totalitarian forms of "Marxism" that were starting to spring up in his day were criticised by him leading him to famously state "If that is Marxism, I am not a Marxist!"
Nick
IMO, the reason Bruce's site didn't pick up much steam is he insisted that his members give out their real-world name to log in. I would imagine that anyone who has witnessed with open eyes the wholesale raping of their privacy on and off the internet would have avoided giving away yet another attack vector against it. It just wouldn't be worth joining any site, no matter the quality, if the price one had to pay was to receive a permanent marketing barrage from automated telemarketing callers linking a meatspace name to a desirable demographic.
Bruce is usually spot-on on most topics, I wonder why he missed this one?
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
Those who insult people or ideas which make them uncomfortable as 'creepy', make me very uncomfortable.
wince
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Transcribed by hand from firefox's cached RSS feed for your informed pleasure. And yes, the first one is "Live Bookmark feed failed to load.".
True, Marx's ultimate vision of Communism was the "withering away of the state". But Marx's explanation of how that would come about basically amounted to:
And, not surprisingly, the state has never actually withered away under any form of centralized Communist government.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
Oh bull. Conservatism has never been more scientific. All European governments were feudalistic monarchies, from the Dark Ages clear to the Enlightenment. That's an unbroken string of 1000 years of monarchies. There were no differences to observe, no laboratories to experiment in, and therefore nothing to be learned. The absence of variation meant that no one, no matter how intelligent or scientifically minded, could pick the best form of government — the parameter space was almost completely unexplored.
The only variation that remained was the strength of the feudal system's influence. And, lo and behold, the few places where the system was weakest — 12th century northern Italy being a prominent example — were precisely the ones that prospered the most. Not only did northern Italy become the epicenter of the Renaissance in culture and art, it also became Europe's leader in science, finance, trade, and prosperity in general.
If the aristocracy had been scientifically seeking what worked best, they would have observed Italy and then attempted to replicate Italy's findings by loosening their own control over distant holdings and observing the results. That didn't happen. Instead, they fought back by strangling free commerce with the creation of mercantilism: a system of government-approved monopolies (e.g. the British East India Company) and strict punitive tariffs on anyone who attempted to circumvent the monopoly.
If most people are irrational, why would you want to put them in power where they can maximize their irrationality? A democratically elected despot is bad, but that doesn't mean that the "democratically elected" is the part you should be taking issue with. The correct response is to attack the idea that a single person should be exalted to the point of despotism. As you yourself rightly point out, most people are irrational: therefore, whichever person becomes a despot is quite likely irrational. The means of ascension to power are irrelevant: democratic vote among the rabble, aristocratic vote among the land-holding nobles, dynastic feuding within a royal line, or bloody coup. The danger is in the outcome, not the method.
No matter how intelligent or aristocratic or rich or whatever a person is, people aren't naturally rational beings, and even the most educated and intelligent people are frequently damn irrational people on anything but a few narrow subjects. There are vitamin-peddling physicists, young-earth creationist neurosurgeons, mathematicians who believe in an entire spectrum of religious beliefs (most of which I guarantee you don't believe in), engineers who believe in crystal healing or homeopathy, molecular biologists who believe AIDS is a government conspiracy to poison people and HIV itself is harmless. The list goes on and on. (Scarily, I had a specific scientist or other professional in mind for every one of those examples.) Elevating one of them to a leadership position over an entire nation is foolish and stupid — no matter how carefully you vet someone's credentials, whoever you pick is pretty much guaranteed to have irrational beliefs. This is, of course, one of the underlying reasons why Jefferson was so keen on checks-and-balances when Hamilton made his push for an elected president-king. Checks and balances keep any one person's irrationality from harming others.
Centralization of power is the danger here, because it allows irrational decisions to be enforced over people other than the person making the irrational decision. It's not that majorities are right
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
...the political movement that Howard Scott started.
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.