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Comment by yegle | Hacker News Reader

If you played Civ5: no ideology is inheritly wrong. As long as the "public opinion" is "content", people would be happy with it. Player would intentionally choose Order or Autocracy to gain some "Tenets". E.g. Order usually gets you better productivity and Autocracy usually gets you better military power.

Right now people in China are mostly content with the current ideology.

This design actually matches reality very well: while US apparently chose Freedom ideology, China chose Order ideology. China would finish impressive large project faster and more efficient, with the cost of dictatorship.

http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Ideology_(Civ5)

(Civ5 got a lot of these right, including a technology called "the Great Firewall" to counter the cultural influence from other civilizations http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Firewall_(Civ5) )

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Civ is a computer game. Among other ways your analogy breaks down, the designers had to make all the ideologies more or less equally viable for game balance reasons. In real life you cannot argue that autocracy and freedom of order are equally viable ideologies (and what do those things even mean in real life, they aren’t as well specified as in a game).

I do not agree there's a superior ideology. But unfortunately I'm not a researcher in this area so cannot provide more insight.

Nothing against One More Turn Simulator, but I don't think you should really use it as a lens to view modern society through its mechanics.

It's an abstraction to allow for fun and balanced gameplay.

Fun post, but I'd argue that china chose is somewhere between the Order and Autocracy ideologies. For starters, while Mao Zedong laid a different set of plans (more similar to the Order branch of Civ5) than most rebel leaders, he was, for the most part, an autocratic leader.[1] They've had a more democratic approach as of late, but it appears that Xi Jinping seems to be turning China into an autocracy once again[2]. It's very interesting to me because for the most part, past Autocratic methods put military development at the forefront and left Technological development as more an afterthought. This seems pretty contradictory to the groundwork China has been laying during the past 30 or so years, placing a lot of value in M&S and installing technocrats to leadership positions[3].

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=YQOhVb5Fbt4C&lpg=PA92&ots=...

[2]http://theweek.com/articles/757554/china-now-just-another-au...

[3]http://www.observa.it/the-technocratic-trend-and-its-implica...

China views democracy as a tool to be used where appropriate, rather than an ideology to adhere to.

anybody who thinks chinese AI won't be weaponized is (as they say in Total Recall) in for a big surprise.

> Order usually gets you better productivity and Autocracy usually gets you better military power. This design actually matches reality very well

It doesn't match reality at all in fact. The exact opposite is true for nearly all cases (China being the sole exception).

The major liberal economies are radically more productive than countries like China, much less the other 'order' type nations. The order economies, save partially for China (which is still extremely poor in the bottom 2/3), are on average impoverished, backwards, and with very low productivity. Even China is still shockingly backwards at a lot of common economic tasks, such as farming (they have ~1/40th the farming productivity of South Korea).

The liberal economies have dozens of major success stories, from Germany to Canada to the US to Sweden. The 'order' group has one, and only insofar as China liberalized its economy and moved away from a rigid command & control economy.

Autocratic doesn't get you a superior military. It typically gets you an economy that is bled and debased to feed the military, which ultimately is self-destroying. See: Russia, whose people are very poor ($8k GDP per capita; $4,000 median net worth). Meanwhile Putin diverts vast resources they can't afford at all, into military spending.

Liberal economies produce superior militaries pound for pound, because they can afford to sustain them over time.

Agree with most of what you said. Sorry I only have lived in China and US so my understanding of ideology is biased and incomplete.

It’s a game that is intentionally designed for balance (wouldn’t be very fun if there was only one path to win). So I’d be cautious about extrapolating to the real world.

> Right now people in China are mostly content with the current ideology

With the lengths that it goes to censor information, how could we know that? Lack of civil war / turmoil does not imply full consent or approval.

This has to be a joke. Are you in China right now? Are they watching what you say?

No I'm not in China right now but I'm originally from China. In a sense I'm a direct victim of the dictatorship: got a call in the morning to "have a tea" with some government officials.

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