I have tried for short summaries, but it hasn’t worked. Very short summary: A “rational” ideology can be based on three morals (or core ideological principles): (1) fidelity to “unbiased” facts and (2) “unbiased” logic (or maybe “common sense” is the better term), both of which are focused on (3) service to an “objectively” defined conception of the public interest.
Maybe the best online attempts to explain this are these two items:
my blog post that tries to explain what an “objective” public interest definition can be and why it is important to be broad, i.e., so as to not impose fact- and logic-distorting ideological limits on how people see issues in politics: http://dispol.blogspot.com/2015/12/serving-public-interest.html
I confess, I am struggling to articulate the concepts, at least to a lay audience and maybe to everyone. That’s why I was really jazzed to come across Less Wrong—maybe some folks here will understand what I am trying to convey. I was under the impression that I was alone in my brand of politics and thinking.
(1) fidelity to “unbiased” facts and (2) “unbiased” logic (or maybe “common sense” is the better term)
These are not particularly contentious, given how they both can rephrased as “let’s be really honest”. However...
service to an “objectively” defined conception of the public interest
is somewhat more problematic. I assume we are speaking normatively, not descriptively, by the way, since real politics is nothing like that.
Off the top of my head, there are two big issues here. One is the notion of the “public interest” and how do you deal with aggregating the very diverse desires of the public into a single “public interest” and how do you resolve conflicts between incompatible desires.
The other one is what makes it “objective”, even with the quotes. People have preferences (or values), some of them are pretty universal (e.g. the biologically hardwired ones), but some are not. Are you saying that some values should be uplifted into the “objective” realm, while others should be cast down into the “deviant” pit? Are there “right” values and “wrong” values?
I’m done with this weird shit arrogant, academic web site. Fuck all of you academic idiots. Your impact on the 2016 November elections: Zero. Your efforts will have zero impact on the Donald’s election. Only the wisdom of American common sense can save us. LW is fucking useless. :)
Yes, I know that I, personally, have had (and will have) absolutely zero effect on the American 2016 November elections. I am fully aware that I, personally, will have absolutely zero impact on Donald Trump’s candidacy, and everything that goes into that. And I am perfectly fine with that, for a single, simple, and straightforward reason; I am not American, I live in a different country entirely. I have a (very tiny) impact on a completely different set of elections, dealing with a completely different set of politicians and political problems.
And that has absolutely nothing to do with why I am here.
I’ve taken a (very) brief look over your blog. And I don’t think I have much to say about it—it is very America-centric, in that you’re not talking about an ideal political system nearly as much as you’re talking about how the American system differs from an ideal political system.
Having said that, you might want to take a look over this article—it seems to cover a lot of the same ground as you’re talking about. (Then note the date on that article; if you really want to change American politics, this is probably the wrong place to be doing it. If you really want to change the mind of the average American, then you need to somehow talk to the average American—I only have an outsider’s view of America, but I understand that TV ads and televised political debates are the best way to do that).
I’m done with this weird shit arrogant, academic web site. Fuck all of you academic idiots. Your impact on the 2016 November elections: Zero. Your efforts will have zero impact on the Donald’s election. Only the wisdom of American common sense can save us. LW is fucking useless. :)
Oh, dear. Somebody had a meltdown and a hissy fit.
Y’know, in some respects LW is like 4chan. Specifically, it’s not your personal army.
You seem to have taken a break from bashing your face into a brick wall. Get back to it, the bricks are waiting.
I read your article on IVN, so this is mostly a response to that.
I do think that it would be great if people thought about politics in a scientifico-rational way. And it isn’t great that you really only have two options in the United States if you want to join a coalition that will actually have some effect. It’s true that having two sets of positions that cannot be mismatched without signaling disloyalty results in a false-dichotomous sort of thinking. But it seems important to think about why things are in this state in the first place. Political parties can’t be all bad, they must serve some function.
Think about labor unions and business leaders. Employees have some recourse if they dislike their boss. They can demand better conditions or pay, and they can also quit and go to another company. But we know that when employees do this, it usually doesn’t work. They usually get fired and replaced instead. The reason is that if an employer loses one employee out of one hundred, then they will be operating at 99% productivity, while the employee that quit will be operating at 0% productivity for some time. Labor unions solve the coordination problem.
Likewise, the use of a political party is that it offers bargaining power. Any scientifico-rational political platform will have to solve such a coordination problem, and they will have to use a different solution from the historical one: ideology. That’s not easy. Which is not to say that it’s not worth trying.
So, it’s not enough that citizens be able to reveal their demand for goods and services from the government, or other centers of power; it’s also necessary that officials have incentives to provide the quality and quantity of goods and services demanded. In democracy this is obtained through the voting mechanism, among other things. A politician will have a strong incentive to commit an action that obtains many votes, but barely any incentive to commit an action that will obtain few votes, even if they have detailed information about what policies would result in the greatest increase in the public interest in the long run, and even if the action that obtains the most votes is not the policy that maximizes public interest in the long run. They would not be threatened by the loss of a few rational votes, or swayed by the gain of a few rational votes, any more than the boss would be threatened by the loss of one employee.
It seems difficult to me to fix something like this from the inside. I think a competitive, external government would be an easier solution. Seasteading is an example of an idea along these lines. I don’t believe that private and public institutions are awfully different in their functions, we often see organizations on each side of the boundary performing similar functions at different times, even if some are more likely to be delegated to one than the other, and it seems to me that among national governments there is a deplorable lack of competition. In the market, the price mechanism provides both a way for consumers to reveal their demand, and a way to incentivize suppliers to supply the quality and quantity of goods and services demanded. If a firm is inefficient, then it goes out of business. However, public institutions are different, in that there often is no price mechanism in the traditional sense. If your government sucks, you mostly cannot choose to pay taxes to a different one. Exit costs are very high as a citizen of most countries. And the existing international community has monopolized the process of state foundation. You need territory to be sovereign, but all territory has been claimed by pre-existing states, except for Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica, which the U.S. and Russia reserve the right to make a claim to, and the condominium in Antarctica does not permit sovereignty way down there a la the Antarctic Treaty System. The only other option is the high sea. Scott Alexander’s Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism is related to this.
I wonder if you’ve thought about stuff like that. I don’t think that our poor political situation is only a matter of individuals having bad epistemology.
I have tried for short summaries, but it hasn’t worked. Very short summary: A “rational” ideology can be based on three morals (or core ideological principles): (1) fidelity to “unbiased” facts and (2) “unbiased” logic (or maybe “common sense” is the better term), both of which are focused on (3) service to an “objectively” defined conception of the public interest.
Maybe the best online attempts to explain this are these two items:
an article I wrote for IVN: http://ivn.us/2015/08/21/opinion-america-needs-move-past-flawed-two-party-ideology/
my blog post that tries to explain what an “objective” public interest definition can be and why it is important to be broad, i.e., so as to not impose fact- and logic-distorting ideological limits on how people see issues in politics: http://dispol.blogspot.com/2015/12/serving-public-interest.html
I confess, I am struggling to articulate the concepts, at least to a lay audience and maybe to everyone. That’s why I was really jazzed to come across Less Wrong—maybe some folks here will understand what I am trying to convey. I was under the impression that I was alone in my brand of politics and thinking.
These are not particularly contentious, given how they both can rephrased as “let’s be really honest”. However...
is somewhat more problematic. I assume we are speaking normatively, not descriptively, by the way, since real politics is nothing like that.
Off the top of my head, there are two big issues here. One is the notion of the “public interest” and how do you deal with aggregating the very diverse desires of the public into a single “public interest” and how do you resolve conflicts between incompatible desires.
The other one is what makes it “objective”, even with the quotes. People have preferences (or values), some of them are pretty universal (e.g. the biologically hardwired ones), but some are not. Are you saying that some values should be uplifted into the “objective” realm, while others should be cast down into the “deviant” pit? Are there “right” values and “wrong” values?
I’m done with this weird shit arrogant, academic web site. Fuck all of you academic idiots. Your impact on the 2016 November elections: Zero. Your efforts will have zero impact on the Donald’s election. Only the wisdom of American common sense can save us. LW is fucking useless. :)
Elections aren’t everything.
Yes, I know that I, personally, have had (and will have) absolutely zero effect on the American 2016 November elections. I am fully aware that I, personally, will have absolutely zero impact on Donald Trump’s candidacy, and everything that goes into that. And I am perfectly fine with that, for a single, simple, and straightforward reason; I am not American, I live in a different country entirely. I have a (very tiny) impact on a completely different set of elections, dealing with a completely different set of politicians and political problems.
And that has absolutely nothing to do with why I am here.
I’ve taken a (very) brief look over your blog. And I don’t think I have much to say about it—it is very America-centric, in that you’re not talking about an ideal political system nearly as much as you’re talking about how the American system differs from an ideal political system.
Having said that, you might want to take a look over this article—it seems to cover a lot of the same ground as you’re talking about. (Then note the date on that article; if you really want to change American politics, this is probably the wrong place to be doing it. If you really want to change the mind of the average American, then you need to somehow talk to the average American—I only have an outsider’s view of America, but I understand that TV ads and televised political debates are the best way to do that).
Good luck!
Oh, dear. Somebody had a meltdown and a hissy fit.
Y’know, in some respects LW is like 4chan. Specifically, it’s not your personal army.
You seem to have taken a break from bashing your face into a brick wall. Get back to it, the bricks are waiting.
I read your article on IVN, so this is mostly a response to that.
I do think that it would be great if people thought about politics in a scientifico-rational way. And it isn’t great that you really only have two options in the United States if you want to join a coalition that will actually have some effect. It’s true that having two sets of positions that cannot be mismatched without signaling disloyalty results in a false-dichotomous sort of thinking. But it seems important to think about why things are in this state in the first place. Political parties can’t be all bad, they must serve some function.
Think about labor unions and business leaders. Employees have some recourse if they dislike their boss. They can demand better conditions or pay, and they can also quit and go to another company. But we know that when employees do this, it usually doesn’t work. They usually get fired and replaced instead. The reason is that if an employer loses one employee out of one hundred, then they will be operating at 99% productivity, while the employee that quit will be operating at 0% productivity for some time. Labor unions solve the coordination problem.
Likewise, the use of a political party is that it offers bargaining power. Any scientifico-rational political platform will have to solve such a coordination problem, and they will have to use a different solution from the historical one: ideology. That’s not easy. Which is not to say that it’s not worth trying.
So, it’s not enough that citizens be able to reveal their demand for goods and services from the government, or other centers of power; it’s also necessary that officials have incentives to provide the quality and quantity of goods and services demanded. In democracy this is obtained through the voting mechanism, among other things. A politician will have a strong incentive to commit an action that obtains many votes, but barely any incentive to commit an action that will obtain few votes, even if they have detailed information about what policies would result in the greatest increase in the public interest in the long run, and even if the action that obtains the most votes is not the policy that maximizes public interest in the long run. They would not be threatened by the loss of a few rational votes, or swayed by the gain of a few rational votes, any more than the boss would be threatened by the loss of one employee.
It seems difficult to me to fix something like this from the inside. I think a competitive, external government would be an easier solution. Seasteading is an example of an idea along these lines. I don’t believe that private and public institutions are awfully different in their functions, we often see organizations on each side of the boundary performing similar functions at different times, even if some are more likely to be delegated to one than the other, and it seems to me that among national governments there is a deplorable lack of competition. In the market, the price mechanism provides both a way for consumers to reveal their demand, and a way to incentivize suppliers to supply the quality and quantity of goods and services demanded. If a firm is inefficient, then it goes out of business. However, public institutions are different, in that there often is no price mechanism in the traditional sense. If your government sucks, you mostly cannot choose to pay taxes to a different one. Exit costs are very high as a citizen of most countries. And the existing international community has monopolized the process of state foundation. You need territory to be sovereign, but all territory has been claimed by pre-existing states, except for Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica, which the U.S. and Russia reserve the right to make a claim to, and the condominium in Antarctica does not permit sovereignty way down there a la the Antarctic Treaty System. The only other option is the high sea. Scott Alexander’s Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism is related to this.
I wonder if you’ve thought about stuff like that. I don’t think that our poor political situation is only a matter of individuals having bad epistemology.