To what extent do rationalists believe actual Technocracy (as in the Howard Scott/Cybersyn kind) is the best form of government and that its coming is inevitable with the replacement of democracy with a more efficient and rational form of rule by technicians (as advisors to the big AI of course)?
As someone who was once fairly heavily involved in the LW diaspora, I think the answer is “not at all”—I’d barely heard of either of those things before. In college I took a history of science class with a prof who once briefly touched on the original 1930s Technocracy movement, but I don’t even remember if the name Howard Scott came up, and I don’t think I’d know about those OG technocrats if not for that class. And of course the libertarian-leaning rationalist crowd is not going to be big on something associated with Salvador Allende.
The number of autodidacts in the rationalist movement seems like it would end up leading them in the opposite direction from a technocracy, honestly.
Might be nitpicking, but I don’t think it’s entirely appropriate to group Project Cybersyn with the technocracy movement. It was intended to provide technological means for a managed economy under democratic socialist political system - which is a combination that would make both technocrats and LWers run for cover faster than you could finish that part of the sentence. Well, at least that’s the impression I got of what it was supposed to be - I can’t read much of the primary information in Spanish.
In my experience, most Rationalists (TM) would be best characterized as “neoliberal” (free markets, modest social safety net, lots of military interventionism to protect business interests). There’s definitely some overlap between neoliberalism and technocracy, but I don’t think many are “pure technocrats.”
There is the weird dark-enlightenment subspecies of the LW-Diaspora though, that things Elon Musk should be the progenitor of a hereditary monarchy though. Idk what’s happening in their minds, other than the Lovecraftian piping of obscene fluets.
I’d agree Technocracy doesn’t have much to do with Project Cybersyn. If you want to know more about the latter, it’s worth reading the work of Stafford Beer, who designed it. His Viable System Model is actually quite interesting; but I suspect the Rationals would reject it for socialism-cootie reasons.