This is a tricky problem. The first-order answer seems to be ‘have the right people in power’, but that’s not an actionable strategy. However, it’s amazing what a difference just one or two people can make—apparently a major reason the UK didn’t delay its lockdown even further and risk ending up like the US is just because of Dominic Cummings.
The two main angles are either making the marketplace of ideas / electoral system select for foresight and sanity more effectively or building institutions with specific remits that can stand aside from such pressures and make the right choices anyway. The first is really hard and the second is really dangerous. However, neither are impossible.
For the first, there’s ordinary electoral reform. An interesting alternative was given in Against Democracy by Jason Brennan—he proposes a new form of epistocracy to better reach higher-quality decisions—you can judge his scheme for yourself.
For the second, building competent independent institutions and then handing off power, the track record is pretty mixed. Independent central banks come to mind as a good example, the recent horrible Coronavirus debacle with the CDC, FDA or Public Health England as an especially bad example. For how to do that sort of thing correctly, you might also want to look at all the things Dominic Cummings has proposed, starting with e.g. this, or this article on Westminster dysfunction. He likes prediction markets, but not exclusively—he talks about building decentralised institutions that can operate with a large degree of independence.
On the specific angle of being more sane with respect to X-risks, I tend to favour the second approach (independent institutions) because I think it likely has a bigger effect and is easier to pull off than raising the society-wide sanity waterline. Toby Ord spoke a lot about this in ‘The Precipice’. As for why, here’s Scott Alexander:
Average national IQ correlates well with GDP per capita and other measures of development. But is average national IQ really the right number to look at? “Smart fraction theory” suggests we should instead look at the range of top IQs, since the smartest people are most likely to drive national growth by inventing things or starting businesses or governing well. Now Heiner Rindermann and James Thompson (names you may recognize!) have given the hypothesis its most complete test so far, and found that yes, IQ at the 95th percentile correlates better with national development than at the 50th percentile. But I am a little skeptical of their results...
Having elite opinion be non-crazy matters a lot in situations like the one we’re in right now. Don’t make ‘we need to improve public discourse’ your plan A for avoiding this level of chaos. So as suggested here, we should hand off more and more stuff to expert boards with limited remits, follow the example of independent Central Banks which didn’t turn into French-revolution style rationalist tyranny over the masses - starting with everything to do with catastrophic risks. Someone in the UK government apparently took that suggestion seriously. Just don’t get Steven Pinker involved.
In writing this answer I somehow completely forgot to mention Garrett Jones’ new book 10% Less Democracy, which essentially goes over every idea listed above along with many others!
This is a tricky problem. The first-order answer seems to be ‘have the right people in power’, but that’s not an actionable strategy. However, it’s amazing what a difference just one or two people can make—apparently a major reason the UK didn’t delay its lockdown even further and risk ending up like the US is just because of Dominic Cummings.
The two main angles are either making the marketplace of ideas / electoral system select for foresight and sanity more effectively or building institutions with specific remits that can stand aside from such pressures and make the right choices anyway. The first is really hard and the second is really dangerous. However, neither are impossible.
For the first, there’s ordinary electoral reform. An interesting alternative was given in Against Democracy by Jason Brennan—he proposes a new form of epistocracy to better reach higher-quality decisions—you can judge his scheme for yourself.
For the second, building competent independent institutions and then handing off power, the track record is pretty mixed. Independent central banks come to mind as a good example, the recent horrible Coronavirus debacle with the CDC, FDA or Public Health England as an especially bad example. For how to do that sort of thing correctly, you might also want to look at all the things Dominic Cummings has proposed, starting with e.g. this, or this article on Westminster dysfunction. He likes prediction markets, but not exclusively—he talks about building decentralised institutions that can operate with a large degree of independence.
On the specific angle of being more sane with respect to X-risks, I tend to favour the second approach (independent institutions) because I think it likely has a bigger effect and is easier to pull off than raising the society-wide sanity waterline. Toby Ord spoke a lot about this in ‘The Precipice’. As for why, here’s Scott Alexander:
Having elite opinion be non-crazy matters a lot in situations like the one we’re in right now. Don’t make ‘we need to improve public discourse’ your plan A for avoiding this level of chaos. So as suggested here, we should hand off more and more stuff to expert boards with limited remits, follow the example of independent Central Banks which didn’t turn into French-revolution style rationalist tyranny over the masses - starting with everything to do with catastrophic risks. Someone in the UK government apparently took that suggestion seriously. Just don’t get Steven Pinker involved.
In writing this answer I somehow completely forgot to mention Garrett Jones’ new book 10% Less Democracy, which essentially goes over every idea listed above along with many others!