Alicornutopia

Now that I think about it I would honestly be kind of intermittently on edge if people could teleport right into my room or into the bathroom or whatever?
My thoughts on that and some other related things, possibly needs updating but relevant paragraph:

Private property is by default blocked (with everything inside it) to anyone but the owner and whoever lives there. People can invite other people in.
- the fact that this is a thing allows a house to take up only the amount of space needed for a door. (The door is the only part of the house that can be seen from the outside, without being the owner: the rest is sensorily blocked)

(blocking is basically two things/people/whatever do not exist to each other)

Also, I'd, if I was going around ruling things and having immense amounts of magic power, probably fork myself and leave one fork -- without tempting powers and with the ability to stop/restrain the other fork -- to supervise said other fork, just in case.

If you had an Actual Magical Bell who is immortal-in-the-good-way and fears no outside threats, we might see something definitely better than human-nature-as-it-is-seen-today.

In addition to the in-principle concerns about Bell rulership I quoted above, I'm worried that in practice Bell-run societies are likely to get stuck in a local maximum of quality of life rather than trying to scan the entire landscape for something better.

Or, with less math/physics jargon: Bells seem to fall into a trap of getting content with circumstances once they've fixed them, and not attempting to make them even better. This manifests itself in taking advice from/relying on an extremely small number of people, typically ones they already knew before completing the world takeover process. I understand that this is to a large extent a symptom of the glowfic medium. But a typical Bell-ruled world has anywhere from a few billion to quadrillions of people in it, and they've encountered an extremely small fraction of these people before taking over. It seems extremely implausible that that small fraction happens to contain exactly the optimal set of people for running a world.

I don’t mind any sufficiently competent* person having unchecked power, but I don’t think I trust any process which is supposed to ensure that the person with unchecked power is sufficiently competent. I don’t think Bells are sufficiently competent; they don’t seem to think about how their plans affect people on individual instead of population levels (see: ground rules almost forbidding violence-in-general, application of the ground rules which are known Joker-incompatible to an entire pre-inhabited Panem without a chance for somebody to go somewhere else, assuming that agreeing to meet somebody (or not even doing that) gives you permission to teleport inside their room, etc.), and both are important. I’m also not sure how to classify Pattern’s handling of Ganymede, which also seems negligent; assuming everybody in the population agrees then this is fine but assuming they don’t it would be trivial to ensure nobody actually was able to contact Pattern despite her attempts.

A Bell with unchecked power probably does better than any real system of governance, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best they could do with their resources. At the very least, everybody should have a means of getting in touch with her or her staff that isn’t as easy to take away as email, which not everybody has access to, or a literal piece of paper which could be lost or stolen.

Also given unchecked power, the choice of “Earth and all its problems, Saturn and all its problems, or being a personal friend of the Empress” is not the best that’s possible. Pattern’s been out of contact for a long time with multiple Jokers available; she should have a way for people to secede from both if they want.

As Jalapeno points out directly above, there’s also the local maximum problem. Rose started with much-less-than-unchecked power, and started improving things a lot, but doesn’t seem to have changed her strategy much when given wishing even when given other Bells as examples. I don’t think she’s laid ground rules, there hasn’t been any mention of her going to countries that she couldn’t have reached without minting, I don’t think she’s even done anything about the social structures that caused her to need to go into the Witchwood in the first place (“If it weren't for the fact that he's the local lawman, she wouldn't even be allowed out into town on her own” and “orphaned seventeen-year-old girls tend to find it in their own best interest to get married, and if she wanted to get married”).

I’m not aware of any problems with Bell-and-Maitimo joint rulership, except for Midnight-related blind spots, but we haven’t seen that in as much detail. I think usurping the totalitarian empire with birdpeople might have been the wrong move, but we don’t have enough details to know for sure. I’m curious what Steel would say about it.

* Assuming “competent” also includes reasonable goals. You could be the best at running a country/planet/world how you like and just not care about the wellbeing of your citizens, but I’m just grabbing all of that for “competent”.

The chance of happening to run into the optimal set of people for running a world is much higher than it looks because metacausality.

Rose did go visit some other continents, which seem like they would've been at least difficult to reach without minting.

This line of conversation is really interesting to me because I'm reading it partially from the perspective of Fareine Korovai, aka the Saddest Gregor, and he's taking careful notes in my head on what pitfalls to avoid when becoming immortal ruler of the world. (He's wary of trying a transition to a more democratic system like his grandfather did, because his grandfather got killed doing that and the end result was several decades of Emperor Siurek. Korovai considers 'personally being immortal ruler of the world' an acceptable minimum from which he will go on to try careful improvements.)

I’m not aware of any problems with Bell-and-Maitimo joint rulership, except for Midnight-related blind spots, but we haven’t seen that in as much detail.

I read Tirehbel and bootstrap as an explicit exploration of what's wrong with Bell-and-Maitimo joint rulership. The fact that this is already present in the Silmaril canon, as well as some of the things various Fingons have said (e.g. in the joint stuff with Kappa), makes me pretty sure that lintamande and Alicorn are already aware of the local maximum problem.

The chance of happening to run into the optimal set of people for running a world is much higher than it looks because metacausality.

Agreed, but then I think it should be taken by characters in-universe that something extremely fishy is going on; they should find it strange that they keep happening to end up in situations where they've already gathered the optimal set of people in advance. Some of this has been discussed in e.g. A Tale of Two Hells.

Yeah, I wrote that sentence before you wrote your local maximum thing and didn’t edit it when I added my comments in response to your post. Getting a Maitimo involved does clear up a lot of Bell blind spots, but not all of them.

Could a Jean + Zari pair maybe also help because Jean is out and about experiencing what it's like to live there and Sari hears all the rumours and so on? Just an idea.
How much could Mileses help with that sort of thing? (I'm becoming all curious about this topic)

Thoughts on peal powers: Elves're straight-up unfamiliar with 'power corrupts' as a concept, though 'powerful people have no incentive to stop being out of touch' they know quite well and don't have a solution to it more scalable than 'well, anyone can drop by for an audience at their nearest embassy, and we're working really hard on ways for more people to have freedom of movement!'. They're also relevantly /Elves/ here; their first reaction to most complaints about suboptimal exploitation of the powers they have will be 'we've been at this for like thirty years, of course we're not very good at it yet'. Flat Maitimos are used to operating in an environment where they do literally know everyone and can be very sure they're not overlooking people, space Maitimos are avoiding positions of significant political power because of the having holed a planet, and Matirin doesn't have people of his own, which means they're not covering as many personnel-related blindspots as they could be. Hex doesn't have this problem internally. Space has a couple colony planets doing different things government-and-level-of-ties-to-Ambaróna-wise, plus most of Endorë isn't Noldorin, plus not all of the Noldor are peal-affiliated (the Feanorian and Nolofinwean hosts split and run countries on opposite corners of the planet); there are democracies and an-cap societies and this one place trying a reputation economy, and they all take immigrants, though not on the scale of 'trillions of people' so this doesn't help the average random person much. The Space Fëanors are working on portals which will solve the parts of this problem that are mobility-related.

Fundamentally, recruitment for high-power positions is a hard problem; there is a lot of incentive to conceal your motives and everyone's acting either on very incomplete information or on time-scales unacceptable to humans. Maitimos are not confident in their ability to conduct two hundred interviews with members of two hundred different species and notice who's going to be a dramatically-better-than-average policy functionary; you can skip that step entirely by letting everyone submit proposals but having all the actual internal work be people you already coordinate well with, and with some exceptions that's what they're doing.

That said, anyone who knows Vanda Nossëo exists can lobby to join it, and anyone who's a member can make a case for being a good use of any of the resources they have and get added to the priority lists accordingly; I imagine some people are putting this to nice effect, just not mostly in the way that lends itself well to stories. (Though if anyone wants to sandbox what the process of actually trying to get your planet's problems solved with Elf bureaucracy looks like, that sounds very fun.)

Thanks for this! I haven't read the books often/recently enough to do this myself, but it sounds like a Culture-meets-Vanda Nossëo box could be very interesting.

(Though if anyone wants to sandbox what the process of actually trying to get your planet's problems solved with Elf bureaucracy looks like, that sounds very fun.)

<obvious joke about the speed of Elf bureaucracy, after checking that Tireh is not present>

Speaking of sandbox opportunities in general, I have been not-entirely-idly wondering if you had any so-far-unexplored corners of Arda that you were interested in running.

(The reason I ask is I'm looking for something to do that's of the form "my character meets the other author's world" because I'm kind of stuck on worldbuilding at the moment (hence asking about other-than-what-you-just-said) and I want to glowfic anyway.)