> His new platform can answer that question quite effectively.
Assuming his game tests for skill and skill alone. Though even if so, it wouldn't explain the difference -- just report it.
> I don't believe in any privileged population groups - I only believe in individual rights
I don't understand. One of these things is normative (individual rights) and the other is positive (privileged population groups). The existence of privileged population groups is a matter of fact[1] -- no one thinks they should (normatively) exist. As to individual rights -- everybody believes in them, too. The question is what would be their nature. For example, I believe that if the wealthy were allowed to wield their power (money) over the poor unhindered, then the poor should be allowed to wield their power (numbers) unhindered over the rich as well. The point is that power, by definition (see next paragraph), means restricting in some way the freedom of others, so to obtain freedom you must either restrict all power or unloose all power.
> they provided multiple disparate and unclear definitions.
Perhaps, but not different enough or unclear enough to preclude study or reasoning. The gist of it is, power = the ability to bend (or sway) others to your will. Power is measured by how many people you can sway, and to what degree you can sway them.
[1]: For example, that white men are more privileged in America than black men is a fact.
The existence of privileged population groups is a matter of fact[1] -- no one thinks they should (normatively) exist.
As a person who cares only about individual rights, I don't care if membership in some particular group is correlated with lack of privilege.
If you want to argue that lack of privilege is an individual injustice, fine - but then you need to stop discussing race since there are plenty of privileged blacks/women and underprivileged asians/males.
...not different enough or unclear enough to preclude study or reasoning.
You assert that white men are more privileged than black men. The definitions you've provided are insufficient for me to concretely state a test we could run to to disprove that.
For example, being black will sway college admissions officers for you but police against you. How do any of these definitions allow me to say that on balance, these things are negative? At what magnitude would the balance become positive?
Anyway, this is completely tangential to starfighter.
> I don't care if membership in some particular group is correlated with lack of privilege.
And what if lack of privilege is caused by association with the group?
> If you want to argue that lack of privilege is an individual injustice
You may believe in individual rights, but you can't deny group injustice. Blacks were made slaves not due to any individual selection.
> For example, being black will sway college admissions officers for you but police against you. How do any of these definitions allow me to say that on balance, these things are negative? At what magnitude would the balance become positive?
You can't possibly be serious. But just in case you are, there are clear tests to measure power: money, positions of control in the private and public sectors, positions of control in the media. QED
I don't deny group injustice. I don't believe injustice based on group membership is worse than any other kind - slavery is an injustice even if it's equal opportunity. Insofar as having bad schools or bad parents is not an injustice, it's also not an injustice if some group has more of them than another.
And insofar as such a thing is an injustice, the fact that it's correlated with some group is irrelevant to me.
If the only way power can be measured is via outcomes (in this case, I guess a high developer salary?), then I'm not sure why we need a new word to describe it. I also don't get what your point is. I guess you are arguing that smart people don't "deserve" the money/control that comes with a developer job any more than dumb people, and therefore starfighter is a bad thing?
Well, group injustice is just individual injustice done to many individuals. And, I think, you would not consider it unfair to demand a robber to pay back the money he's stolen. The problem with underprivileged groups is not the reality of the offense against them, nor the identity of the victim, but the identity of the perpetrator, and this is where study and of power comes in. Because the reality is that human society, like gas molecules, performs many acts not as individuals but as a group (even collective property preceded the invention the first private property), and therefore the perpetrator in the offenses of underprivilege is society as a whole. The actions under discussion are not as acts of nature but acts like for men, acting as a group (and collective action is a positive fact). Assigning individual responsibility is as futile as assigning individual responsibilty to specific gas molecules in expanding a balloon; doing so is just an ineffective model. And what society has stolen as a group (from individuals!) it must pay back as a group. Identifying the victims as a group is just a matter of statistical convenience as well as an aid in the description of the dynamics.
That an electron is measured through its effect does not mean that we don't need to describe the electron itself. In fact, it is crucial that we do in order to understand its action. Same thing for power: you almost never observe it directly, but its study, and the term itself, are required in order to understand the workings of society.
And as to this game, I don't think it's inherently bad at all, but if its role in society is not studied it might become an unwilling accomplice to injustice. And, if, one day it is somehow discovered that abilities that convey power are dominantly genetic, I do not think that we should give certain jobs to people unsuited to them, but our society is judged not by the achievements of those born to privilege, but by how it takes care of those who lack it. Exactly how this moral obligation should be carried out is a complex matter in itself, and far beyond what I can write here.
That an electron is measured through its effect does not mean that we don't need to describe the electron itself.
We certainly do. So look at what physicists did. First they came up with a clear definition - "a discrete and indivisible negatively charged particle". Second, they went out of their way to distinguish concepts like an electron from charge as a fluid and other models. They didn't simply declare "well, electric current proves electrons exist", they went to crazy lengths like Millikan's oil drops to distinguish these concepts.
When they can't actually distinguish these concepts intrinsically (as was the case with Maxwell's equations vs Aether), they tend to drop the more complex theory.
In contrast, you seem quite resistant to doing any of these things. I don't quite understand why.
Resistant to what? I just gave you a clear and concise definition of power (the ability to bend others to your will). The social sciences did all of the required work as well, I'm just unable to write a whole sociology book in HN comments. There have been countless studies in sociology, history, anthropology and psychology examining the different forms of power and how it works. But bear in mind that these sciences are much more complicated than physics; in fact they're intractable. The simplest social mechanism is more complicated than the gravitational interactions of 1 million bodies.
Actually the example I’ve give of the electron is a rather weak one, as the electron is a very specific thing, while power is the most fundamental concept in all the social sciences except psychology (i.e. history, sociology, anthropology and political science). A better example — the obvious one, in fact — is energy. Energy can also only be measured through its effects, and yet it is a very fundamental concept. Describing it not as one thing but as disparate manifestations would take away its explaining power and many of our most useful models (I should really write a book called “social science for physicists”).
I’ve also given more thought to your focus on individual rights. Individual rights are an obvious “good thing”, but here’s where they get complicated: When I think of individual rights I imagine a universe composed of mass but no force. Such a universe will be no more than a cloud of plasma. But in our universe, mass gives rise to force, and force creates the interesting interactions that have, in turn, created our world. Likewise, human society is not made of humans, but of human interaction, interaction gives rise to power, and power, by definition, restricts freedom. Now, this is not a bad thing necessarily, as, if you think about it, all cooperation is basically the voluntary yielding of freedom in order to concentrate power for some common goal that wouldn’t have otherwise been achievable. But that doesn’t change the fact that whether they like it or not, just as mass-ful particles induce force, humans induce power, and both force and power take away freedom from others. So saying something like “everyone should be free” makes little sense, as that is only possible in a plasma cloud. In order to grant freedom, freedom has to be compromised — based on some values — and then managed somehow. Obviously, different people will prefer different compromises. Personally, I’d either like to see all power restricted and controlled, or all power unrestricted (including physical violence).
This is why I think that American libertarianism is either hypocritical or ignorant. It is either ignorant of the fact that there is no freedom without power (and hence, coercion), or hypocritical in calling for unrestrained use of certain forms of power alone (money) and not others (physical violence, preferably mediated by a democratic government that restrains the use of money).
I was therefore delighted (intellectually, that is) to learn recently of a fringe Silicon Valley movement called neoreactionism or “Dark Enlightenment”, funded by Peter Thiel. These guys (few women would join that openly sexist, openly autistic movement) are probably all former libertarians that have discovered that there is no such thing as freedom from power, and now openly call for a tyranny. As someone who’d studied medieval history in graduate school (though I have never obtained my doctorate) I was delighted to see the movement’s leader, a programmer by the name of Curtis Yarvin, analyze some historical document and call for the return of feudalism (he complains that those documents are not studied by historians, which is true for the simple reason that they are false accounts).
The problem with the return to feudalism — even if you were to believe the false accounts of how life was good then (it by no means was) — is that the power structure back then was at least held in check by technology, that is, lack thereof. With the invention of mass media and fast transportation, power can be more concentrated than ever before, which is why the greatest invention of Western civilization was the central government, which rose to contain and manage power (of course, this only made conflicts among those governments more violent than ever before, but that fear of annihilation reduced the number of conflicts considerably). BTW, the modern academic definition of politics is, not surprisingly, the management of power in society.
Feudalism combined with modern technology has only been tried — to the best of my knowledge — once, in nineteenth century America. The US at the time had a very weak federal government with almost no regulation. The result was a period of extremely fast economic expansion but at great social cost: a large portion of the American population was enslaved in all by name by a very small number of slave-owners-in-all-by-name known as the Robber Barons (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Stanford, JP Morgan, Frick, et al.). All options were taken from them — they couldn’t migrate (they were sometimes paid in company-issued currency, that was useless anywhere else) and couldn’t organize to concentrate power to improve their lot (in fact, they did organize, but the robber barons had private armies that killed the rabble rousers and intimidated everyone else). The people cried for help, and Theodore Roosevelt rescued them by creating federal regulation.
Energy is also well defined - for any particular case you'll be able to write down a precise formula defining it. For example, a system of colliding particles has E=sum(p^2/2m) (p is momentum, m is mass).
If you want to make a claim that one system has more energy than another, testing that claim will be easy - just apply the formula. If you wanted me to take it seriously, you should have applied the power formula to figure out whether influencing college admissions officers > influencing police - all you did was scoff.
I assert that your use of the word "power" is pointless. It transmits no information about the world, much like how you use privilege. Why do you insist on engaging in long discussions advocating the use of words that mean merely "any probabilistic cause of social outcomes"?
Information can most certainly be conveyed outside the use of precise formulas, lest you think that entire fields of human endeavor are bunk (merely "long discussions"): art; music; aspects of philosophy, anthropology and sociology; etc. Nonetheless, I would posit that a number of quantifiable metrics contribute to pron's definition of power (the ability to bend others to your will), such as net worth, yearly earnings, spending patterns, education levels, employment statistics, and social network models, especially when these are considered over time.
These "long discussions" that you show disdain for are attempting to introduce a semantic base on which "well defined" terms can be further developed and evaluated in light of new social experiences (e.g., the latest claims of * -ism in SV). pron has set out an extended metaphor, say, which is akin to describing how one would perform an oil drop experiment. That is the opposite of "resistance". Your assertion that "power" and "privilege" are semantically empty is completely without grounding. Just because the metaphoric equivalent of "applying the power formula" has been left as an exercise to the reader, does not mean that the terms of the equation are void of meaning.
Power is also well defined (I have provided a definition which is not "any probabilistic cause of social outcomes") and in cases like this -- easy to measure. You may assert the last forty years of research are pointless. That it's definition applies in many cases (though not all -- an earthquake leveling a city isn't directly related to power) does not make it any less useful (just like energy is always involved in any interaction of particles). If you apply the definition, you will see that influencing college admissions officers << influencing police in this case.
The fact that intractable interactions lend themselves less easily to formulations (let alone closed expressions) does not take away their reality or invalidate the model. Much of the work in applied mathematics (non-linear equations) is qualitative, as well. I think it is you who are resisting to admit that the past decades of research have taught us a lot about how society works.
If your definition is not simply equivalent to social outcomes, there should be an experiment that can potentially measure power absent social outcomes. If so, what is it?
I.e., suppose a group has good outcomes but low power or vice versa. How can I find out?
You can't measure power without its effects just like you can't measure energy (at the very least, it will have to affect your measurement device), but you can often tell whether the effect was due to power or not. Sometimes -- like with the case of potential energy -- you might be able to deduce its existence once you've learned how it works for a while. But, you can often see powerful people fail (say, a billionaire dies in a plane crash, or loses all his money when the market crashes), and powerless people thrive (a homeless man wins the lottery). But power, like force in physics, is the main thing driving human interaction. It is certainly the only mechanism of any interesting social dynamics, but it is not trivial, as power -- like energy -- takes many forms.
So, to me, your question sounds a bit like, "how do we know when the planets in the solar system move by gravity, and when they move by something else?", to which the answer is that the planets almost always move by gravity, except very rarely, when, say, hit by a particularly large asteroid; how doe we know when that happens? We look. Same here, if a group has good outcomes and low power and vice versa -- while very rare (as power is at the core of the mechanism), you can either study the case carefully (which is what historians do), or compare it with power's known outcomes to see if it's one of those flukes. But, you'll say, I can isolate gravity and test it in a lab to make sure I'm certain this is how the planets move. Well, experiments like that are harder in the social sciences, but they are done quite regularly. Two very famous experiments in power are the Milgram experiment (testing authority power) and the Stanford prison experiment (testing authority power as well as its effect on those who have it). Many dictator games are experiments in other forms of power.
Besides, I don't see what exactly you're driving at. Thousands of studies have uncovered some mechanisms at the very core of human society. The mechanisms behave similarly enough to warrant a name (kinetic energy, potential energy etc.), and that concept seems to be at the heart of what drives most of society. Not only that, it induces a quantifiable (if sometimes only roughly, or even in theory) property. That mechanism, along with its quantifiable trait is called power. It was found to be roughly "the ability to bend others to your will", and has produced interesting, useful models (qualitative -- not quantitative). You want to give it another name? Fine, call it X. But 100 years ago we did not know about X as much as we do now. If you want to identify X with something that you think has been known for a long time -- you'll be wrong; if you want to identify X with something you think is still a complete mystery -- you'll be wrong again. You want to argue with scientists about the names they choose and then quote someone who says arguing about names is futile -- great. What is it that you're saying?
The concept of power conveys a lot of knowledge that has been gathered over decades. Your responses seem to be like those of someone who's just heard of energy, and says, "If energy is what moving things possess, why not just call it speed? Oh, a ball at the top of the hill also has energy, why not just call it height? Oh, fire has energy too? So energy is everywhere, and if it's everywhere then it doesn't mean anything!" Either that someone decides to learn basic physics, or decides to stay ignorant. But if he decides to stay ignorant, I think you would agree it would be foolish of him to continue arguing.
I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For everything, "Energy makes it go." Now that doesn't mean anything. What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind "energy."...Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Wakalixes." That's the general principle: "Wakalixes makes it go."...It's also not even true that "energy makes it go," because if it stops, you could say, "energy makes it stop" just as well.
I claim that this critique applies equally well to your use of the word "power".
And your comparisons to real sciences are quite inapt - again, as I've pointed out to you before, a discussion with tptacek on crypto or kasey_junk on high speed trading results in the aforementioned posters being very specific while their critics are vague. Kind of the opposite of what is happening here.
Note that you still haven't actually provided an experiment or measurement that could identify a successful yet powerless group (if such a thing existed), or vice versa.
You keep saying "your use of the word power" as if power is not a well known, well studied concept. It is not "my use of the word power" but simply power. You did the same thing when we discussed sexism, which is an academic term invented relatively recently by feminist scholars, which you insisted on treating as some obscure, ill-defined notion. This tone shows a misplaced contempt to a vast scholarly endeavor.
In any case, I don't see how that critique applies to power at all, because, yet again, some of the mechanics involving power are well known and well documented. Nobody says "power makes it so". It's just that explaining the power dynamics of racial neighborhood segregation or sexism in tech would take dozens of pages.
It is not simply that "power is what drives women participation in tech down". I can trace a process -- some documented and some hypothesized -- starting with "classical" gender roles, through the massive transition in gender roles and general separation between the sexes that occurred in Victorian times (they had rooms in houses meant to serve men and rooms for women) and shapes society to this day, through the history of women in computing (starting with the transition of switchboards from being seen as a job for women to one for men), with the more general association of which jobs are for men and for women. That would take me about 50 pages, I guess. But power is the central mechanism. I'm not saying "power did it"; I can show how. Just not here.
> And your comparisons to real sciences are quite inapt
Well, I've been using metaphors, naturally. The intractable sciences are much more complex than physics, chemistry and even biology. There are no closed-form formulas in the social sciences; at least not yet.
> a discussion with tptacek on crypto or kasey_junk on high speed trading
Maybe they're just better communicators than me, and maybe HFT is more amenable to discussion in HN comments than the history of gender roles and the evolution of power in human society. However, if you have specific questions (and they would have to be more specific than "how come there are fewer women in tech") I could try to answer succinctly if it is at all possible. The problem is that these are things that are never even taught to first-year social sciences students (some are only taught in grad school), and unlike with HFT, I don't think you even have the basics.
For example, I don't know if you're at all familiar with the techniques used to study history or sociology, how historical documents are analyzed, how different societies are compared etc., and I really can't lay out an intro to social studies here (BTW, that Curtis Yarvin guy I told you about suffers from the same problem, except he considers himself knowledgable for some reason. His writings read like an Aristotelian scholar discussing quantum mechanics; he's completely ill equipped to handle the materials he's using, which is why he draws such ridiculous conclusions. Of the months spent teaching students simply how to approach reading documents, he doesn't even apply the very first lesson: classifying the genre of the document and identifying the intended audience and purpose)
Now, I'm sure that there are some introductory materials to gender studies that skip the basics of social science, but I doubt you'll find them convincing if you're not familiar with the methodology. If you are interested, I could try to find some online course in history or sociology that seems good, but my guess is that they won't get to gender roles in an intro course (and if they do, it will be by skipping the groundwork, which, again, will make it seem less convincing).
> Note that you still haven't actually provided an experiment or measurement that could identify a successful yet powerless group (if such a thing existed), or vice versa.
You still haven't provided an example of a planetary system whose planets revolve around a star due to a force other than gravity! Gravity is what makes planets revolve around a star, and power is the mechanism by which groups (and individuals) obtain success. Once in a while there are aberrations, to which I have provided examples: winning the lottery. Or, if California is covered by the ocean, then the very powerful people who live their might become extremely unsuccessful. Of course because that population is powerful, various disasters would probably be addressed by the government faster and with more rigor than in other parts of the US, but that may still happen.
You still haven't provided an example of a planetary system whose planets revolve around a star due to force other than gravity!
I asked for a measurement which could identify such a group, not a measurement that would. I can easily tell you experiments to test this in physics - solve Newton's law of motion and find a celestial body with motion that doesn't agree with it.
If I were advocating for the invisible roller coaster track theory of celestial motion, I couldn't provide such an experiment. The invisible roller coaster tracks are observable only by celestial motion - whichever way the moon moves, that's where the track is.
The only way to refute the theory would be via an alternate method of observing the position of the tracks and then observing whether the moon actually followed that track. If someone didn't provide that alternate method, I'd say he was not even wrong.
Well, there are numerous examples of groups that had little power that achieved success, but remember that there's a feedback loop here, as once you achieve success you obtain power. But everywhere you see social mobility, those are cases where people with little power slowly obtained success, which then turned to power.
Examples from the middle ages include grants of knighthood[1] as payment for some unusual service. While usually a knight would only come from wealthy or noble families (or at least a family with good connections) -- hence, from a position of some power -- sometimes knighthood was granted to brave foot soldiers -- i.e. people with little power. Sometimes, the title came with land (and the serfs that worked it, of course).
In non feudal societies, social mobility was usually achieved through money, although some classes were barred from obtaining any money whatsoever (slaves). You can see groups of immigrants, provided the host society did not block their steps too much, slowly gain money, and later recognition and connections. This process would often take several generations.
Analyzing those processes is helped by the fact that often you can observe power directly. Money and nobility titles are very conspicuous forms of power, easily measurable directly. More hidden forms of power such as connections can also be traced directly (a boy of low background would be taken to the home of a merchant as a gift to his parents in recognition of some service; this lets you trace connections across classes); charisma (which in the middle ages was a great way to attain power in religious circles) could be seen in some extraordinary ascetic acts[2] or visions[3]. The latter was one of the few ways women could rise to positions of power in medieval societies (see Joan of Arc), although others would be marrying, and surviving, a man of power. While it was often expected of widows to remarry, some medieval societies were surprisingly relatively accepting widows, recognized their independence, and allowed them to transact on their own.
>I was therefore delighted (intellectually, that is) to learn recently of a fringe Silicon Valley movement called neoreactionism or “Dark Enlightenment”, funded by Peter Thiel.
AFAIK Thiel's sole, extremely tenuous connection to the Dark Enlightenment is thinking libertarianism and democracy are incompatible. He certainly hasn't funded any of its leading lights. This is less accurate than the belief that the Koch brothers control the Tea Party. (They did have a large impact on its early growth.)
>These guys (few women would join that openly sexist, openly autistic movement)
Ableist. If you want an example of a woman who's been involved (more than periphally but not as an identified adherent) look up Justine Tunney. If you're transphobic then she doesn't count as a woman, ableist.
>are probably all former libertarians that have discovered that there is no such thing as freedom from power, and now openly call for a tyranny.
That's one branch of the trichotomy in case you're interested.
>As someone who’d studied medieval history in graduate school (though I have never obtained my doctorate) I was delighted to see the movement’s leader, a programmer by the name of Curtis Yarvin, analyze some historical document and call for the return of feudalism (he complains that those documents are not studied by historians, which is true for the simple reason that they are false accounts).
This is a massive misreading of Yarvin, a.ka. Mencius Moldbug. He's got a hard on for absolute monarchy, not for feudalism. The two are very, very different. Feudalism was basically a Western European phenomenom, Ottoman depotism, Russian autocracy or France during the reign of the Sun King are more his thing.
What false accounts are you referring to? Could you provide some links to the deceptive documents among Yarvin's output?
>The problem with the return to feudalism — even if you were to believe the false accounts of how life was good then (it by no means was) — is that the power structure back then was at least held in check by technology, that is, lack thereof. With the invention of mass media and fast transportation, power can be more concentrated than ever before, which is why the greatest invention of Western civilization was the central government, which rose to contain and manage power (of course, this only made conflicts among those governments more violent than ever before, but that fear of annihilation reduced the number of conflicts considerably).
Autocracy, not feudalism.
> Feudalism combined with modern technology has only been tried — to the best of my knowledge — once, in nineteenth century America.
This is so ridiculous that it makes me question your claims of having studied history at a graduate level. Have you ever heard of the Bolsheviks? They had a successful revolution in the Russian Empire in 1917 and founded and ruled the Soviet Union until its dissolution. They arose in a state that attempted to combine autocratic government with modern technology.
>The US at the time had a very weak federal government with almost no regulation. The result was a period of extremely fast economic expansion but at great social cost: a large portion of the American population was enslaved in all by name by a very small number of slave-owners-in-all-by-name known as the Robber Barons (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Stanford, JP Morgan, Frick, et al.).
Are you aware that the USA has been among the richest societies on Earth for its entire existence? People were poor because there was so little to go around, not because people were hoarding for the sake of it. You occasionally say lucid and intelligent things but the US economy was growing insanely fast by any historic standards more or less from settlement by Europeans to around 1970. It's still growing insanely fast but the trend has slowed down. economic growth in North America was labour limited for a long, long time. Things were much, much better in North America than anywhere else on Earth, all this while having large inflows of migrants from much poorer nations, i.e. the entire rest of the planet.
>All options were taken from them — they couldn’t migrate (they were sometimes paid in company-issued currency, that was useless anywhere else) and couldn’t organize to concentrate power to improve their lot (in fact, they did organize, but the robber barons had private armies that killed the rabble rousers and intimidated everyone else). The people cried for help, and Theodore Roosevelt rescued them by creating federal regulation.
Did you study under Howard Zinn[0] or something? Everywhere else was worse. The Pinkertons were awful but the USA has never been a weak enough state to allow private armies anywhere on its territory. It was probably the friendliest country on Earth for labour organising for the period in question.
My knowledge of the Dark Enlightenment is very limited at the moment, as I've just discovered it during preliminary research for a study of fringe movements in California related to technology. But during a cursory reading of Yarvin's I've found a few mentions of feudalism as a desired goal (obviously, under some weak autocracy), as well as mentions of traditional gender roles and a defense of slavery. I also believe that Peter Thiel funds Yarvin through a startup company of his. I will not list the false accounts he mentions (I noted down a few so far), because I don't want to discuss the subject here. A cursory glance, though, reveals the Dark Enlightenment to be a fascinating Californian fringe movement, with some truly novel interpretations of familiar ideologies (mostly fascism, but not quite, as fascism was directly influenced by Romanticism while DE rejects Romanticism except that restricted Ayn-Randian form of it, and fascism was very much nationalistic -- again, through romantic influence -- while DE isn't).
As to your description of the Gilded Age, I am not sure what our points of disagreement are. Yes, the Pinkertons weren't actual armies, nor were they entirely ignored by the government. My description was greatly simplified for brevity. As to the conditions of workers at the time, comparisons to other societies are irrelevant, because that economic growth (which was the result of immigration, land expansions and new resources) was not at all contingent on the exploitation that was taking place.
In general, comparisons are often less useful when the framing discussion (in this case, questions of policy) is normative. If a tyrant comes to an island where the population is starving, and feeds them a loaf of bread a day but forces them to do backbreaking work for him, then their position is better than the alternative, but no one would suggest that this is in any way desirable or even ethical. The same would be true for another tyrant who feeds his enslaved population two loaves of bread a day.
Comparisons are useful if the claim is made that no other policy would have been possible, which I don't think anyone is making. Sure, growth would have been slower (concentrated power is always a lot more efficient, as time and resources are not required to achieve compromise and accommodate other stakeholders), but preference of efficiency over other human goals is purely a matter of value.
The Bolsheviks instituted an autocratic form of communism, which is pretty much the complete opposite of feudalism (which is usually the result of a free market, although the terms are anachronistic as no one used the term "free market", when real feudalism was actually in place), and in any case, feudalism is certainly anathema to any ideology promoting equality (like communism).
Assuming his game tests for skill and skill alone. Though even if so, it wouldn't explain the difference -- just report it.
> I don't believe in any privileged population groups - I only believe in individual rights
I don't understand. One of these things is normative (individual rights) and the other is positive (privileged population groups). The existence of privileged population groups is a matter of fact[1] -- no one thinks they should (normatively) exist. As to individual rights -- everybody believes in them, too. The question is what would be their nature. For example, I believe that if the wealthy were allowed to wield their power (money) over the poor unhindered, then the poor should be allowed to wield their power (numbers) unhindered over the rich as well. The point is that power, by definition (see next paragraph), means restricting in some way the freedom of others, so to obtain freedom you must either restrict all power or unloose all power.
> they provided multiple disparate and unclear definitions.
Perhaps, but not different enough or unclear enough to preclude study or reasoning. The gist of it is, power = the ability to bend (or sway) others to your will. Power is measured by how many people you can sway, and to what degree you can sway them.
[1]: For example, that white men are more privileged in America than black men is a fact.