I recall EY commenting at some point that the way to make political progress is to convert intractable political problems into tractable technical problems. I think this kind of discussion would be more interesting and more profitable than a “traditional” mind-killing political debate.
It might be interesting, for example, to develop formal rationalist political methods. Some principles might include:
Always conduct a comprehensive fact-gathering phase before beginning any policy discussion.
Develop techniques to prevent people from becoming emotionally committed or status-linked to positions.
Subject every statement to formal logical analysis; if the statement fails any obvious rule of logical inference, the statement is deleted and its author censured.
Rigorously untangle webs of inference. A statement arguing against the death penalty should involve probability estimates of the number of crimes the penalty does (or does not) deter, the cost of administering it, etc, and connect these estimates to a global utility function. The statement must include analyses of how the argument changes in response to changes in the underlying probability estimates.
I disagree; discovering that someone holds political views opposed to yours can inhibit your ability to rational consider arguments; arguments become soldiers, etc.,
Besides, I think the survey from ages ago showed the general spread of political views, and I doubt much has changed since. For discussing particular issues, there are other places available, and it may be that only by not discussing hot topics can we keep the barriers to entry up that keep the LW membership productive.
But the quality of discussion here is generally much higher than elsewhere. I would like us to try discussing politics and see how it goes—but I’d prefer a new toplevel post to an Open Thread discussion.
I think the quality of discussion is higher because we don’t discuss politics: if we started, we’d pull in political trolls and fanatics. If you consider how common political discussion sites are, and what a city on a hill LW is, I’d be very conservative about anything that might open the gates. We have rarity value, and it could be hard to re-gain.
Perhaps a minimum karma level to discuss politics?
This is a special case of a general problem. There are lots of solutions, it just doesn’t seem likely that any will be implemented (unless, as rumor has it, there is already a secret forum to discuss other subjects that less wrongers are only invited to when they have proven themselves).
Also, I’m not sure that just saying: “Hey people! Talk about politics over here. ” is going to lead to a great discussion. I’d be much more interested in a discussion of how and where what we have in common as rationalists should affect our political views. It seems likely that we all ought to be able to come to important but limited agreements (about how to think about policy, about how the policy making process should be organized, and about a select few policy issues- religious issues, science, maybe a few more) from which we could expand to other areas, constructively. Maybe we all end up as ‘liberaltarians’ maybe not. But there needs to be a common starting point or everyone will just default to signaling, talking points and rhetorical warfare.
That’s the post I was trying to find, and failing. However, if there is such a conspiracy (beyond simply random chats between clever people) it’s either quite small or not done by Karma or you (with nearly exactly 10 times my karma count) would have been invited.
I have a parallel problem at University: trying to find discussion groups, debating societies, etc. where people agree enough on the basics and are interested in the truth, are small enough that signalling isn’t too great a problem and entery is suffiently easy for me to be able to speak and yet large enough to self-perpetuate.
Maybe Econlog or somesuch should create a LessWrong Parallel?
It’s probably not worth discussing ideas that require code changes unless you’re in a position to implement them and present patches, and even then it may not be accepted.
I think we fend off trolls pretty well: we tend to just vote them down and otherwise ignore them. I don’t think we have to worry about a troll invasion here.
Equally, I don’t think it’s worthwhile discussing drastic subject-matter changes, partly becuase that is the level of change that would be required to affect it safely.
At the moment, trolls are both in the minority, and both their views and presentation differ markedly from ours: whether by Aumann or Groupthink, we have both a large set of beliefs we agree on that aren’t widely held outside LW, and a special terminology that we use.
However, in Politics none of these would be the case; widespread disagreement makes it hard to tell what is in good faith, we don’t have a specialised language, and without a rigourous way of approaching the problems, are unlikely to reach a closer set of conclusions than any other fairly Libertarian internet grouping.
If a top-level post is made of this, then make it about politics in general, not just US politics. (As a member of a controversial political movement, I’d be curious to hear what people’s opinions on current copyright law here are.)
I’m an intellectual property abolitionist, which makes my views much more extreme than the Pirate Party, though I’m aware that they have watered themselves down for pragmatic reasons and that the founders are most likely IP abolitionists.
I’ll wait for the top level post though… I’d post it myself but figure I should finish Politics is the Mind Killer first.
I have a nearly unlimited amount of viewpoints on political matters, but more and more I think it’s almost irrelevant. Politics seems like this kind of fun thing where we can have infinitely many new and continuing arguments, but this arguing is never going to accomplish anything. I’m not a senator, and even senators quickly become jaded and cynical at how little actual power their high status provides.
I think the answer is most likely that we can’t. I’d be willing to have a discussion potentially leading us to that conclusion. I’ll put it in my too-long queue of top-level posts to write...
The guy who wanted to start a polling firm might have a good idea, but I think if Nate Silver hasn’t started his own polling firm yet we probably aren’t going to.
Historically I’ve stayed away from political activism, but I got involved with a group trying to raise awareness about the police assaults on the University of Pittsburgh after the G20 summit. I thought it was a small enough issue that we could make a difference, but obviously we didn’t. While I give the posters here a little more credit for being able to get things done than my leftist friends in Pittsburgh, I have no practical ideas for how we could actually accomplish something not at the meta-level.
Probably the best thing we could do is try to spread some of the memes raised in Politics is the Mind Killer.
I don’t know how to feasibly do that except by convincing a bunch of people (future teachers) which reduces to the initial question, how to change stuff (= how to convince people). Sorry.
But at least future teachers are a smaller group of people than a majority of voters.
Well, the mentioned Pirate Party is an example of succesfull political activism. Our party is already doing politics even before our first national elections, since the party often gives out statements on new legislation as requested by the justice ministry. Our neighbour parties in Sweden and Germany are even more succesful. And many of the lesswrong/transhumanist people are active in the Finnish Pirate Party.
I believe my views were formed largely based on Macaulay: terms on copyright should be short (no longer than 30 years, I would say), and I take a liberal view on derivative works. There are also interesting things to say about orphaned works.
I think one thing we could discuss without wandering onto a minefield is political mechanisms — discussions of ways we can make the system (legislative procedures, division of power, voting systems, etc.) more rational, without discussing specific policies.
We would still have to be careful, as even this depends on certain subjective goals — what do we want the political system to do, ultimately? — but that itself could be an interesting meta-discussion. However, it’s a discussion we’d probably have to have before we even start talking about ideal political mechanisms, because we need to agree on what we want a political system to accomplish (that is, what an ideal policy-making system would look like, and how it would acquire and realize values, keeping in mind that it’ll have to be run mostly by humans for the time being) before we can start understanding how it might work.
And writing that paragraph made me realize a meta-meta-discussion that might also be necessary: is it even possible to separate policy goals from political structural goals? Maybe it is, but it could be difficult. The practical outcome of a direct democracy, a representative democracy, a futarchy, and a dictatorship will all be significantly different, yet in somewhat predictable directions, so even if we banish all policy discussion, we’d need to figure out how to uncover and squash any bias that could make us prefer certain abstract political systems because of actual specific policy goals.
Or maybe we’re not interested in doing that in the first place — maybe you’re satisfied with supporting systems of government that are simply most likely to result in your own values being fulfilled, in which case your ideal system would be a dictatorship run by you (or the system that’s the best at approximating the same), unless you value democracy/pluralism itself more strongly than anything you could achieve as dictator.
And I think I’ll stop musing here, before this post becomes an infinite regress of paragraphs deconstructing their predecessors. My original point was going to be that discussing rational systems of government could be less mind-killing than discussing specific policies and politicians and parties, but now it appears it might not be any less complicated.
I’d be more interested in an initial discussion of whether it is in fact rational to discuss politics (except to the extent that you gain intrinsic enjoyment from the discussion). It is clear that for most people in most elections their vote is irrelevant (the chances of it making any difference are negligible). This suggests that time spent discussing politics for the purposes of deciding how to vote is wasted and such discussion is irrational. Arguably the only people who rationally devote any significant time to thinking or talking about politics are the small group of people who actually make their living as politicians or political commentators. Robin Hanson has often made the point that politics is not about policy—it is mostly about signalling status and in-group/out-group dynamics. What would we be hoping to achieve by discussing politics at less wrong?
How about a more reasonable topic to discuss—Corporate Organizational Design for a seastead.
You are starting a seastead with certain ideas on how to make money in the long run. How do you make a structure that is better than present governments or corporations?
Corporate design is much simpler than already present nation design.
Also, a good design emerging from this will theoritically be better than any political design in today’s nations, since a seastead by definition starts with a huge economic disadvantage.
Why would LW want to discuss this - A well run corporation might be the closest thing in the present world to a superintelligence.
But what would be the use of that? Do you have the ear of the president? Do you have reason to think that the problem with politics is a lack of good policy ideas rather than the inability of the political process to enact good policy? Are you prepared to devote yourself full time to promoting whatever wonderful never-before-considered policies the great minds of less wrong are able to concoct? Politics is not about Policy.
If we were to decide to discuss politics, the best possible use I can think of is to generate strategies for implementing (cheap) positive changes in policy. As to how to implement, California State Senator Joe Simitian has his There Oughta be a Law Contest.
the best possible use I can think of is to generate strategies for implementing (cheap) positive changes in policy.
Competitive government seems about the best hope for this to me, though I rate its chances of success pretty low it seems slightly less hopeless than fixing conventional politics.
The real question is whether you think discussing politics is an effective use of your time. I’m more interested in discussions where ultimately I can take concrete actions that deliver the most expected value possible. Politics doesn’t generally seem like such a topic.
I’m similarly skeptical about the benefits of a conversation about politics but lets not overgeneralize. Politics is not about policy. Except when it is. Certain parts of government are more amenable to policy changes than others. The key is identifying those areas and organizing around them. Change is usually easiest in areas where there aren’t entrenched interests influencing legislators, where the general public doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other, and when legislators aren’t running for reelection or aren’t at risk of losing. Areas where I think Less Wrong could make non-trivial impacts: federal science policy—specifically stream-lining the grant process to save scientists time and resources, and local public school curriculum—specifically finding some amenable school districts and try to improve/add to/create critical thinking/classical rationality curricula.
If people were interested I’d be especially interested in digging into the second.
Change is usually easiest in areas where there aren’t entrenched interests influencing legislators, where the general public doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other, and when legislators aren’t running for reelection or aren’t at risk of losing.
where the general public doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other
A similar way of saying the same thing: change gets easier when debates don’t map onto pre-existing signaling narratives. Obviously anything that explicitly threatens religion is going to be a bitch to get through. I don’t think critical thinking course in liberal districts would raise a lot of ire even if we were giving students tools that, properly applied, would tell them something about their religious beliefs.
I think local public school curriculum fails on two of your criteria: ‘entrenched interests influencing legislators’ (teachers’ unions, publishers of textbooks, parents’ groups, think tanks, etc.); ‘where the general public doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other’ (parents tend to care quite a bit about what/how their kids are taught, ideologically motivated groups care quite a bit about what kids are taught, many interest groups have opinions about what focus education should have). There are already lots of groups trying to influence education in all kinds of ways, including local public school curriculums.
(teachers’ unions, publishers of textbooks, parents’ groups, think tanks, etc.)
Teachers unions are definitely an entrenched interest but they aren’t really entrenched on the issue of curriculum. I’m not trying to fire them, just add another elective class or change a couple of class days in the English curriculum. Textbook publishers sure, but they don’t have necessarily opposing views. You could just as easily turn them into allies. Parents groups, think tanks? I would start in a poor or urban district—but I can’t think of any reason parents groups would oppose a critical thinking elective in liberal, wealthy districts.
Obviously all policy areas have someone ‘invested’. But it isn’t like getting rid of subsidies for the sugar industry, ending teacher tenure or limiting unionizing.
parents tend to care quite a bit about what/how their kids are taught, ideologically motivated groups care quite a bit about what kids are taught, many interest groups have opinions about what focus education should have
These groups care about curriculum when the debate involves sex or religion. Thats about it. I’m not trying to teach 2nd graders about sex or tell anyone their religion is false. Aspects of critical thinking are already part of the AP Language curriculum—we’re not talking about some radical transformation of the school system. Around half the parents at my public high school were lawyers, you’re gonna tell me they’re going to object to a critical thinking class?
Again, obviously people are affected by policy. But not every issue makes people go crazy like evolution, sex or money. I’m actually surprised you picked the curriculum issue to criticize… reforming the government grant-giving bureaucracy strikes me as a lot harder.
I’m actually surprised you picked the curriculum issue to criticize… reforming the government grant-giving bureaucracy strikes me as a lot harder.
You may well be right, but I know very little about grant-giving so I didn’t address it. I imagine there are a number of powerful interest groups involved there as well however.
My usual response to this question is that the average Democrat is better than the average Republican, but the very best Republicans are better than the very best Democrats. However, given that my model of the “average Democrat” is the average person in the Bay Area, and my model of the “average Republican” is some mix of Fox news wacko and George W. Bush, I’m not sure I should trust this. Does anyone have any anecdotes about Democrats out side of the Bay Area? Republicans?
Have you witnessed any actual discourse in person, or are you relying on the news media to obtain information on this topic? If so, you should expect that if the news media is biased, your view will be biased as well (if you haven’t already corrected for this).
By “public discourse” I did mean things like talking points and media interviews. I’m sure many republicans have extremely intelligent private conversations over policy, e.g. Hank Paulson.
I imagine most of Hank Paulson’s private policy conversations revolved around devious new schemes to funnel more billion dollar backdoor bailouts to Goldman Sachs.
Was this downvoted for conspiracy theory-ing or because an actual majority of Hank Paulson’s private discussions weren’t really about how to steal money? I agree that Paulson couldn’t have spent a majority of the time discussing how to funnel money to his friends and comrades, but it seems reasonably well established that some of the financial meltdown conspiracy theories are true.
He (Dubya) raised the self esteem of millions of foreign citizens. Being able to laugh at the expense of the leader of a dominant world power gives significant health benefits.
I think Dubyah definitely began the end of US hegemony (which I see as a bad thing), but probably in larger part because of his devastation of the US economy and the placement of a gigantic US debt into the hands of its sole future strategic rival.
Yeah, it was the destruction of the economy that made him the second worst US President (after Lincoln). All of those things contributed to the end of US Hegemony, I meant that the war in Iraq functions as a potent symbol of the end of that power.
Our disagreement is about the meaning and purpose of globalization; let’s not get into that discussion right now, it’ll take a while.
You can compare those, because the large debts weren’t caused by the “economic crisis”. The fact that most Western nations also ran up debt doesn’t mean the economic crisis caused the debt increase, only that they chose the same response to the economic crisis (which probably has more to do with increasing their own discretionary power than with lowering unemployment).
Singapore didn’t run up huge levels of debt and has a much lower unemployment level than the countries that did run up debt. They could have chosen otherwise, but didn’t.
Singapore isin’t a Western nation or a fully developed on, and they have extremely high economic growth (around 10%), so that’s not comparable to stable Westerne economies. Singapore had economic growth of 1.1% during 2008, so they didn’t have to loan anything in that year.
In fact, a quick search showed that Singapore had significant budget deficit for 2009:
“-- 2009/2010 budget deficit to be 6 pct of GDP, before accounting for transfers. ”
So it seems Singapore has used their national reserves immediately after their economy fell, just like all the other Western nations. They don’t have to take a loan because they have significant national reserves.
Although it’s true that Obama has increased spending more than Bush, even if he didn’t increase it (inflation adjusted) at all, the U.S. would have taken a significant loan, just like all the other Western nations, as tax income dropped for probably all of them.
Furthermore, economic crisis did indeed cause large debts, because it caused the tax income for the state to drop, and the rest was loaned because Western nations do not wan’t to reduce spending. Although nothing seems to have consensus in economics, many economists made the decision not to cut spending, which can make the economic crisis even worse. I think that was even a common agreement amongst most Western nations.
Summing up, your claim that large debts are a bad thing in this situation has not been proved at all. Although I’m not an expert in economics, there’s no consensus for that claim in science.
Singapore, 22 Jan. S$20.5b (US$15b) might not sound like a lot of money in these days of trillion dollar collapses, but when it represents 6% of GDP (estimated at US$227b in 2007), then it becomes one of the most aggressive stimulus plans on a per capita basis in the planet.
Singapore isin’t a Western nation or a fully developed on, and they have extremely high economic growth (around 10%), so that’s not comparable to stable Westerne economies.
Whether Singapore is considered “Western” or not is irrelevant. The disagreement was over whether the “economic crisis” forced the current US Government to run up large amount of debt. Singapore shows that not only is it possible to face a global economic crisis without running up large amounts of debt, but that doing so can leave you better off in terms of unemployment. And to claim that Singapore isn’t a “developed” nation is quite strange. Singapore has a per capita GDP of $50,300, while the US only has a per capita GDP of $46,400, Germany has a per capita GDP of $34,200, and France has a per capita GDP of $32,800. Are you going to argue that the US, Germany, and France aren’t fully developed?
Furthermore, economic crisis did indeed cause large debts, because it caused the tax income for the state to drop, and the rest was loaned because Western nations do not wan’t to reduce spending.
The economic crisis only caused large debt increases if going out to eat everyday causes me to take on debt (because I refuse to cut back elsewhere in my budget). The fact remains that there were viable alternatives to multiplying the debt (alternatives that actually worked better in the case of Singapore).
Although nothing seems to have consensus in economics, many economists made the decision not to cut spending, which can make the economic crisis even worse. I think that was even a common agreement amongst most Western nations.
The fact that Western nations listened to the economists that told them that current events justifies them increasing their own discretionary power and ability to give handouts to their allies instead of listening to economists that told them otherwise doesn’t surprise me one bit.
I posted a link that showed Singapore had a budget deficit the very second their economy shrinked, in fact, the same thing happened in Western nations. Singapore didn’t have to take a loan because thay had a national reserve.
So in fact the policy Singapore has is the same as Western nations, with the only difference that Singapore happened to have money saved. Singapore didn’t want to cut spending to they used their savings. There’s no real difference in policy, they even have a stimulus package.
So in fact the policy Singapore has is the same as Western nations, with the only difference that Singapore happened to have money saved.
How do you get that as being a coincidence? The very same things that make a nation spend prudently are the ones that make it have a reserve fund in the first place! What’s America’s emergency reserve fund? There isn’t one—just the possibility of borrowing more. (Not necessarily a bad move for a nation with the US’s credit rating, but still.)
I bring this up in part because it parallels the differences between US states. Some states had to get backdoor bailouts through grants for projects, while others (like Texas) only had the budget problem of “couldn’t contribute as much to the rainy day fund (a real account) this time”. The very concept is foreign to e.g. California.
I see, I don’t remember any of that being in the post I replied to (perhaps you edited your post?). I see how that article supports your view that Singapore did engage in “economic stimulus”. My (mis)perception comes from the fact that I was only looking at the change in the debt level, when they paid for their “stimulus package” out of savings (so didn’t show up as much increase in debt).
On the other hand, I think my judgment that Singapore responded better than the US to the economic downturn is still well supported. Their Stimulus was much more focused on lowering the cost of hiring workers than the US stimulus package and for that the current administration deserves some blame. Don’t you agree?
Mind-killing taboo topic that it is, I’d like to have a comment thread about LW readers’ thoughts about US politics.
I recall EY commenting at some point that the way to make political progress is to convert intractable political problems into tractable technical problems. I think this kind of discussion would be more interesting and more profitable than a “traditional” mind-killing political debate.
It might be interesting, for example, to develop formal rationalist political methods. Some principles might include:
Always conduct a comprehensive fact-gathering phase before beginning any policy discussion.
Develop techniques to prevent people from becoming emotionally committed or status-linked to positions.
Subject every statement to formal logical analysis; if the statement fails any obvious rule of logical inference, the statement is deleted and its author censured.
Rigorously untangle webs of inference. A statement arguing against the death penalty should involve probability estimates of the number of crimes the penalty does (or does not) deter, the cost of administering it, etc, and connect these estimates to a global utility function. The statement must include analyses of how the argument changes in response to changes in the underlying probability estimates.
I disagree; discovering that someone holds political views opposed to yours can inhibit your ability to rational consider arguments; arguments become soldiers, etc.,
Besides, I think the survey from ages ago showed the general spread of political views, and I doubt much has changed since. For discussing particular issues, there are other places available, and it may be that only by not discussing hot topics can we keep the barriers to entry up that keep the LW membership productive.
survey link?
Here it is. But why don’t you just use the search function?
I expected it to be named something other than “survey results.” Also want to promote the habit of including links in original posts.
Quite. And the relivant section,
“138 gave readable political information...We have 62 (45%) libertarians, 53 (38.4%) liberals, 17 (12.3%) socialists, 6 (4.3%) conservatives, and [no] commie.”
But the quality of discussion here is generally much higher than elsewhere. I would like us to try discussing politics and see how it goes—but I’d prefer a new toplevel post to an Open Thread discussion.
I think the quality of discussion is higher because we don’t discuss politics: if we started, we’d pull in political trolls and fanatics. If you consider how common political discussion sites are, and what a city on a hill LW is, I’d be very conservative about anything that might open the gates. We have rarity value, and it could be hard to re-gain.
Perhaps a minimum karma level to discuss politics?
This is a special case of a general problem. There are lots of solutions, it just doesn’t seem likely that any will be implemented (unless, as rumor has it, there is already a secret forum to discuss other subjects that less wrongers are only invited to when they have proven themselves).
Also, I’m not sure that just saying: “Hey people! Talk about politics over here. ” is going to lead to a great discussion. I’d be much more interested in a discussion of how and where what we have in common as rationalists should affect our political views. It seems likely that we all ought to be able to come to important but limited agreements (about how to think about policy, about how the policy making process should be organized, and about a select few policy issues- religious issues, science, maybe a few more) from which we could expand to other areas, constructively. Maybe we all end up as ‘liberaltarians’ maybe not. But there needs to be a common starting point or everyone will just default to signaling, talking points and rhetorical warfare.
That’s the post I was trying to find, and failing. However, if there is such a conspiracy (beyond simply random chats between clever people) it’s either quite small or not done by Karma or you (with nearly exactly 10 times my karma count) would have been invited.
I have a parallel problem at University: trying to find discussion groups, debating societies, etc. where people agree enough on the basics and are interested in the truth, are small enough that signalling isn’t too great a problem and entery is suffiently easy for me to be able to speak and yet large enough to self-perpetuate.
Maybe Econlog or somesuch should create a LessWrong Parallel?
It’s probably not worth discussing ideas that require code changes unless you’re in a position to implement them and present patches, and even then it may not be accepted.
I think we fend off trolls pretty well: we tend to just vote them down and otherwise ignore them. I don’t think we have to worry about a troll invasion here.
Equally, I don’t think it’s worthwhile discussing drastic subject-matter changes, partly becuase that is the level of change that would be required to affect it safely.
At the moment, trolls are both in the minority, and both their views and presentation differ markedly from ours: whether by Aumann or Groupthink, we have both a large set of beliefs we agree on that aren’t widely held outside LW, and a special terminology that we use.
However, in Politics none of these would be the case; widespread disagreement makes it hard to tell what is in good faith, we don’t have a specialised language, and without a rigourous way of approaching the problems, are unlikely to reach a closer set of conclusions than any other fairly Libertarian internet grouping.
I’d prefer a top-level post. They’re cheap and this could get busy.
You could literally post just this.
If a top-level post is made of this, then make it about politics in general, not just US politics. (As a member of a controversial political movement, I’d be curious to hear what people’s opinions on current copyright law here are.)
I’m an intellectual property abolitionist, which makes my views much more extreme than the Pirate Party, though I’m aware that they have watered themselves down for pragmatic reasons and that the founders are most likely IP abolitionists.
I’ll wait for the top level post though… I’d post it myself but figure I should finish Politics is the Mind Killer first.
I have a nearly unlimited amount of viewpoints on political matters, but more and more I think it’s almost irrelevant. Politics seems like this kind of fun thing where we can have infinitely many new and continuing arguments, but this arguing is never going to accomplish anything. I’m not a senator, and even senators quickly become jaded and cynical at how little actual power their high status provides.
Maybe we could turn the discussion to “how might a community of rationalists actually accomplish something, re. this or that issue”?
I think the answer is most likely that we can’t. I’d be willing to have a discussion potentially leading us to that conclusion. I’ll put it in my too-long queue of top-level posts to write...
The guy who wanted to start a polling firm might have a good idea, but I think if Nate Silver hasn’t started his own polling firm yet we probably aren’t going to.
Historically I’ve stayed away from political activism, but I got involved with a group trying to raise awareness about the police assaults on the University of Pittsburgh after the G20 summit. I thought it was a small enough issue that we could make a difference, but obviously we didn’t. While I give the posters here a little more credit for being able to get things done than my leftist friends in Pittsburgh, I have no practical ideas for how we could actually accomplish something not at the meta-level.
Probably the best thing we could do is try to spread some of the memes raised in Politics is the Mind Killer.
Get control of the educational system.
I don’t know how to feasibly do that except by convincing a bunch of people (future teachers) which reduces to the initial question, how to change stuff (= how to convince people). Sorry.
But at least future teachers are a smaller group of people than a majority of voters.
Well, the mentioned Pirate Party is an example of succesfull political activism. Our party is already doing politics even before our first national elections, since the party often gives out statements on new legislation as requested by the justice ministry. Our neighbour parties in Sweden and Germany are even more succesful. And many of the lesswrong/transhumanist people are active in the Finnish Pirate Party.
Me too.
I believe my views were formed largely based on Macaulay: terms on copyright should be short (no longer than 30 years, I would say), and I take a liberal view on derivative works. There are also interesting things to say about orphaned works.
I think one thing we could discuss without wandering onto a minefield is political mechanisms — discussions of ways we can make the system (legislative procedures, division of power, voting systems, etc.) more rational, without discussing specific policies.
We would still have to be careful, as even this depends on certain subjective goals — what do we want the political system to do, ultimately? — but that itself could be an interesting meta-discussion. However, it’s a discussion we’d probably have to have before we even start talking about ideal political mechanisms, because we need to agree on what we want a political system to accomplish (that is, what an ideal policy-making system would look like, and how it would acquire and realize values, keeping in mind that it’ll have to be run mostly by humans for the time being) before we can start understanding how it might work.
And writing that paragraph made me realize a meta-meta-discussion that might also be necessary: is it even possible to separate policy goals from political structural goals? Maybe it is, but it could be difficult. The practical outcome of a direct democracy, a representative democracy, a futarchy, and a dictatorship will all be significantly different, yet in somewhat predictable directions, so even if we banish all policy discussion, we’d need to figure out how to uncover and squash any bias that could make us prefer certain abstract political systems because of actual specific policy goals.
Or maybe we’re not interested in doing that in the first place — maybe you’re satisfied with supporting systems of government that are simply most likely to result in your own values being fulfilled, in which case your ideal system would be a dictatorship run by you (or the system that’s the best at approximating the same), unless you value democracy/pluralism itself more strongly than anything you could achieve as dictator.
And I think I’ll stop musing here, before this post becomes an infinite regress of paragraphs deconstructing their predecessors. My original point was going to be that discussing rational systems of government could be less mind-killing than discussing specific policies and politicians and parties, but now it appears it might not be any less complicated.
Talking at a meta level, I like Futarchy’s split between values and policies to achieve them.
That is a very useful split which can be adopted even in non-futarchic governments.
For eg. It is an obvious moral thing to take into account everybody’s values. Universal franchise for values.
It is not so obvious to take into account everyone’s opinion about how to achieve the same equally seriously. Simply because of differing expertise.
Two or three more paragraphs of de-construction would be good enough for a top-level post
I’d be more interested in an initial discussion of whether it is in fact rational to discuss politics (except to the extent that you gain intrinsic enjoyment from the discussion). It is clear that for most people in most elections their vote is irrelevant (the chances of it making any difference are negligible). This suggests that time spent discussing politics for the purposes of deciding how to vote is wasted and such discussion is irrational. Arguably the only people who rationally devote any significant time to thinking or talking about politics are the small group of people who actually make their living as politicians or political commentators. Robin Hanson has often made the point that politics is not about policy—it is mostly about signalling status and in-group/out-group dynamics. What would we be hoping to achieve by discussing politics at less wrong?
How about a more reasonable topic to discuss—Corporate Organizational Design for a seastead.
You are starting a seastead with certain ideas on how to make money in the long run. How do you make a structure that is better than present governments or corporations?
Corporate design is much simpler than already present nation design.
Also, a good design emerging from this will theoritically be better than any political design in today’s nations, since a seastead by definition starts with a huge economic disadvantage.
Why would LW want to discuss this - A well run corporation might be the closest thing in the present world to a superintelligence.
Lets discuss.
What would I hope to accomplish? I would hope we could come up with policy proposals which might be cheap to enact.
But what would be the use of that? Do you have the ear of the president? Do you have reason to think that the problem with politics is a lack of good policy ideas rather than the inability of the political process to enact good policy? Are you prepared to devote yourself full time to promoting whatever wonderful never-before-considered policies the great minds of less wrong are able to concoct? Politics is not about Policy.
If we were to decide to discuss politics, the best possible use I can think of is to generate strategies for implementing (cheap) positive changes in policy. As to how to implement, California State Senator Joe Simitian has his There Oughta be a Law Contest.
Competitive government seems about the best hope for this to me, though I rate its chances of success pretty low it seems slightly less hopeless than fixing conventional politics.
The real question is whether you think discussing politics is an effective use of your time. I’m more interested in discussions where ultimately I can take concrete actions that deliver the most expected value possible. Politics doesn’t generally seem like such a topic.
I’m similarly skeptical about the benefits of a conversation about politics but lets not overgeneralize. Politics is not about policy. Except when it is. Certain parts of government are more amenable to policy changes than others. The key is identifying those areas and organizing around them. Change is usually easiest in areas where there aren’t entrenched interests influencing legislators, where the general public doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other, and when legislators aren’t running for reelection or aren’t at risk of losing. Areas where I think Less Wrong could make non-trivial impacts: federal science policy—specifically stream-lining the grant process to save scientists time and resources, and local public school curriculum—specifically finding some amenable school districts and try to improve/add to/create critical thinking/classical rationality curricula.
If people were interested I’d be especially interested in digging into the second.
Umm, really?
Like I said:
A similar way of saying the same thing: change gets easier when debates don’t map onto pre-existing signaling narratives. Obviously anything that explicitly threatens religion is going to be a bitch to get through. I don’t think critical thinking course in liberal districts would raise a lot of ire even if we were giving students tools that, properly applied, would tell them something about their religious beliefs.
I think local public school curriculum fails on two of your criteria: ‘entrenched interests influencing legislators’ (teachers’ unions, publishers of textbooks, parents’ groups, think tanks, etc.); ‘where the general public doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other’ (parents tend to care quite a bit about what/how their kids are taught, ideologically motivated groups care quite a bit about what kids are taught, many interest groups have opinions about what focus education should have). There are already lots of groups trying to influence education in all kinds of ways, including local public school curriculums.
Teachers unions are definitely an entrenched interest but they aren’t really entrenched on the issue of curriculum. I’m not trying to fire them, just add another elective class or change a couple of class days in the English curriculum. Textbook publishers sure, but they don’t have necessarily opposing views. You could just as easily turn them into allies. Parents groups, think tanks? I would start in a poor or urban district—but I can’t think of any reason parents groups would oppose a critical thinking elective in liberal, wealthy districts.
Obviously all policy areas have someone ‘invested’. But it isn’t like getting rid of subsidies for the sugar industry, ending teacher tenure or limiting unionizing.
These groups care about curriculum when the debate involves sex or religion. Thats about it. I’m not trying to teach 2nd graders about sex or tell anyone their religion is false. Aspects of critical thinking are already part of the AP Language curriculum—we’re not talking about some radical transformation of the school system. Around half the parents at my public high school were lawyers, you’re gonna tell me they’re going to object to a critical thinking class?
Again, obviously people are affected by policy. But not every issue makes people go crazy like evolution, sex or money. I’m actually surprised you picked the curriculum issue to criticize… reforming the government grant-giving bureaucracy strikes me as a lot harder.
You may well be right, but I know very little about grant-giving so I didn’t address it. I imagine there are a number of powerful interest groups involved there as well however.
What do you think President Obama should focus on? And do you think he has been squandering the bully pulpit?
I honestly don’t really understand the question. A president should be able to push several different agendas at the same time.
Thoughts on Democrats and Republicans?
My impression is that Democrats have much more intellectually honest, serious public discourse, although that’s not saying much.
My usual response to this question is that the average Democrat is better than the average Republican, but the very best Republicans are better than the very best Democrats. However, given that my model of the “average Democrat” is the average person in the Bay Area, and my model of the “average Republican” is some mix of Fox news wacko and George W. Bush, I’m not sure I should trust this. Does anyone have any anecdotes about Democrats out side of the Bay Area? Republicans?
Have you witnessed any actual discourse in person, or are you relying on the news media to obtain information on this topic? If so, you should expect that if the news media is biased, your view will be biased as well (if you haven’t already corrected for this).
By “public discourse” I did mean things like talking points and media interviews. I’m sure many republicans have extremely intelligent private conversations over policy, e.g. Hank Paulson.
I imagine most of Hank Paulson’s private policy conversations revolved around devious new schemes to funnel more billion dollar backdoor bailouts to Goldman Sachs.
Was this downvoted for conspiracy theory-ing or because an actual majority of Hank Paulson’s private discussions weren’t really about how to steal money? I agree that Paulson couldn’t have spent a majority of the time discussing how to funnel money to his friends and comrades, but it seems reasonably well established that some of the financial meltdown conspiracy theories are true.
What good things can be said about G. W. Bush?
He hugely increased African aid and foreign aid in general (though with big deadly strings). That came as a big surprise to me.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/aid-to-africa-triples-during-bush-presidency-but-strings-attached-430480.html
good?
Edit:
Better link
He (Dubya) raised the self esteem of millions of foreign citizens. Being able to laugh at the expense of the leader of a dominant world power gives significant health benefits.
As a result of the conquest of Iraq, water was let into the marshes which Saddam Hussein had been letting dry out. This is a clear environmental win.
The war in Iraq was the beginning of the end of US hegemony.
I think Dubyah definitely began the end of US hegemony (which I see as a bad thing), but probably in larger part because of his devastation of the US economy and the placement of a gigantic US debt into the hands of its sole future strategic rival.
Yeah, it was the destruction of the economy that made him the second worst US President (after Lincoln). All of those things contributed to the end of US Hegemony, I meant that the war in Iraq functions as a potent symbol of the end of that power.
Our disagreement is about the meaning and purpose of globalization; let’s not get into that discussion right now, it’ll take a while.
Millions of lives saved in Africa through expanded public health.
He didn’t increase the projected level of debt for the US as much as the current president.
You can’t compare those, because the economic crisis happened mostly after Bush. Large debts have been taken by pretty much all Western nations.
You can compare those, because the large debts weren’t caused by the “economic crisis”. The fact that most Western nations also ran up debt doesn’t mean the economic crisis caused the debt increase, only that they chose the same response to the economic crisis (which probably has more to do with increasing their own discretionary power than with lowering unemployment).
Singapore didn’t run up huge levels of debt and has a much lower unemployment level than the countries that did run up debt. They could have chosen otherwise, but didn’t.
Singapore isin’t a Western nation or a fully developed on, and they have extremely high economic growth (around 10%), so that’s not comparable to stable Westerne economies. Singapore had economic growth of 1.1% during 2008, so they didn’t have to loan anything in that year.
In fact, a quick search showed that Singapore had significant budget deficit for 2009: “-- 2009/2010 budget deficit to be 6 pct of GDP, before accounting for transfers. ” So it seems Singapore has used their national reserves immediately after their economy fell, just like all the other Western nations. They don’t have to take a loan because they have significant national reserves.
Although it’s true that Obama has increased spending more than Bush, even if he didn’t increase it (inflation adjusted) at all, the U.S. would have taken a significant loan, just like all the other Western nations, as tax income dropped for probably all of them.
Furthermore, economic crisis did indeed cause large debts, because it caused the tax income for the state to drop, and the rest was loaned because Western nations do not wan’t to reduce spending. Although nothing seems to have consensus in economics, many economists made the decision not to cut spending, which can make the economic crisis even worse. I think that was even a common agreement amongst most Western nations.
Summing up, your claim that large debts are a bad thing in this situation has not been proved at all. Although I’m not an expert in economics, there’s no consensus for that claim in science.
http://www.economywatch.com/economy-business-and-finance-news/singapore-budget-2009-resilience-package-is-economic-stimulus.html
Whether Singapore is considered “Western” or not is irrelevant. The disagreement was over whether the “economic crisis” forced the current US Government to run up large amount of debt. Singapore shows that not only is it possible to face a global economic crisis without running up large amounts of debt, but that doing so can leave you better off in terms of unemployment. And to claim that Singapore isn’t a “developed” nation is quite strange. Singapore has a per capita GDP of $50,300, while the US only has a per capita GDP of $46,400, Germany has a per capita GDP of $34,200, and France has a per capita GDP of $32,800. Are you going to argue that the US, Germany, and France aren’t fully developed?
The economic crisis only caused large debt increases if going out to eat everyday causes me to take on debt (because I refuse to cut back elsewhere in my budget). The fact remains that there were viable alternatives to multiplying the debt (alternatives that actually worked better in the case of Singapore).
The fact that Western nations listened to the economists that told them that current events justifies them increasing their own discretionary power and ability to give handouts to their allies instead of listening to economists that told them otherwise doesn’t surprise me one bit.
I posted a link that showed Singapore had a budget deficit the very second their economy shrinked, in fact, the same thing happened in Western nations. Singapore didn’t have to take a loan because thay had a national reserve.
So in fact the policy Singapore has is the same as Western nations, with the only difference that Singapore happened to have money saved. Singapore didn’t want to cut spending to they used their savings. There’s no real difference in policy, they even have a stimulus package.
How do you get that as being a coincidence? The very same things that make a nation spend prudently are the ones that make it have a reserve fund in the first place! What’s America’s emergency reserve fund? There isn’t one—just the possibility of borrowing more. (Not necessarily a bad move for a nation with the US’s credit rating, but still.)
I bring this up in part because it parallels the differences between US states. Some states had to get backdoor bailouts through grants for projects, while others (like Texas) only had the budget problem of “couldn’t contribute as much to the rainy day fund (a real account) this time”. The very concept is foreign to e.g. California.
Yeah, yeah, mind = killed, etc.
I see, I don’t remember any of that being in the post I replied to (perhaps you edited your post?). I see how that article supports your view that Singapore did engage in “economic stimulus”. My (mis)perception comes from the fact that I was only looking at the change in the debt level, when they paid for their “stimulus package” out of savings (so didn’t show up as much increase in debt).
On the other hand, I think my judgment that Singapore responded better than the US to the economic downturn is still well supported. Their Stimulus was much more focused on lowering the cost of hiring workers than the US stimulus package and for that the current administration deserves some blame. Don’t you agree?