Hi from San Diego, California. I’m an attorney with academic training in molecular biology (BS, MS, PhD). I have an intense interest in politics, specifically the cognitive biology/social science of politics. I’m currently reading The Rationalizing Voter by Lodge and Taber. I have read both of Tetlock’s books, Haidt’s Righteous Mind, Khaneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Thaler’s Nudge, Achen and Bartels Democracy for Realists and a few others. I also took a college-level MOOC on cognitive biology and attendant analytic techniques (fMRI, etc) and one on the biology of decision making in economics.
Based on what I have taught myself over the last 6-7 years, I came up with a new “objective” political ideology or set of morals that I thought could be used to at least modestly displace or supplement standard “subjective” ideologies including liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, socialism, Christianity, anarchy, racism, nationalism and so on. The point of this was an attempt to build an intellectual framework that could help to at least partially rationalize politics, which I see as mostly incoherent/irrational from my “objective” public-interest oriented point of view.
I have tried to explain myself to both lay audiences (I’m currently a moderator at Harlen’s Place, a politics site on Disqus https://disqus.com/home/channel/harlansplace/ ), but have failed. I confess that I’m becoming discouraged at the possibility of applying cognitive and social science to even slightly rationalize politics. What both Haidt and Lodge/Tabor have to say, makes me think that what I am trying is futile. I have tried contact about 50-60 academics, including Tetlock, Haidt, Bartels and Taber, but none have responded with any substance (one got very annoyed and chewed me out for wasting his time; http://www.overcomingbias.com/ ) - most don’t respond at all. I get that—everyone is busy and crackpots with new ideas are a dime a thousand.
Anyway, I stumbled across this site this morning while looking for some online content about the affect heuristic. I thought I would introduce myself and try to fit in, if I’m up to the standards here. My interest is in trying to open a dialog with one or more people who know this science better than myself so that I can get some feedback one whether what I am trying to do is a waste of time. As a novice, I suspect that I misunderstand the science and overestimate the limits of human rationality in politics in a society that lives under the US constitution (free speech).
Objective politics, defined as unbiased fact and reason in service to the public interest is described and defended. Biology-based objectivity, the last political frontier.
That points for me into the direction of objectivism with all it’s problems.
There are good reasons to be quite suspicious when someone claims that they don’t have an ideology and there views are simply “objective”.
What we need to do as a country is obvious.
To me saying something like that without bringing forward a specific proposal suggests to me politcal ignorance.
I have been arguing and debating politics online for over 7 years now and I am quite used to how people speak to each other. There is nothing at all politically ignorant in my comment. When I say something is obvious, it has to be taken in the context of the entire post. It’s easy to cherry pick and criticize by the well-known and popular practice of out-of-context distortion of a snippet on content in a bigger context. I have seen that tactic dozens of times and I reject it. It’s cheap shot and nothing more. You can do better. Bring it on.
My blog and all of my other online content speaks directly to the American people in their own language. I do not address academics in academic language. I have tried academic language with the general public and it doesn’t work. Here’s a news flash: There is an astonishing number of average adult Americans who have little or no trust in most any kind of science, social and cognitive science included. As soon as one resorts to the language of science, or even mentions something as “technical” as “cognitive science”, red flags go up in many people and their minds automatically switch to conscious rationalization mode. My guess is that anti-science attitude applies to about 40-60% of adult Americans if my online experience is a reasonably accurate indicator. (my personal experience database is based on roughly 600-1,000 people—no, I am not so stupid as to think that is definitive, it’s just my personal experience)
I am trying to foster the spread of the idea that maybe, just maybe, politics might be rationalized at least enough to make some detectable difference for the better in the real world. My world is firmly based in messy, chaotic online retail politics, not any pristine, controlled laboratory or academic lecture room environment.
Political ignorance is in the eye of the beholder. You see it in me and I see it in you.
By the way, reread the blog post you criticize as making no specific proposal. There is a specific proposal there: based on the social science, remove fuel 1 from the two-fuel fire needed to spark a terrorist into being. How did you miss it? Did you read what I said, or did your eye simply float down to the offending phrase and that triggered your unconscious, irrational attack response?
I do appreciate your comment on the review of Achen and Bartel’s book. If your whining about spelling errors is the best shot you have, then I am satisfied that I understand the book well enough to use to to leverage my arguments when I cross swords with non-science, real people in the real world. I have no interest in basing my politics on my misunderstanding of areas of science that are outside my formal academic training. I need to be as accurate and honest as I can so that people can’t dismiss my arguments for rationality as based in ignorance, stupidity and/or mendacity. That’s another cheap shot tactic I come across with some regularity. The only defense against that attack is to be correct.
Shall we continue our dance, or is this OK for you?
I have been arguing and debating politics online for over 7 years now and I am quite used to how people speak to each other.
That’s the problem. Most relevant political discussions that have real world effects don’t happen online. Knowing how to debate politics online and actual knowing how politics processes work are two different things.
By the way, reread the blog post you criticize as making no specific proposal. There is a specific proposal there: based on the social science, remove fuel 1 from the two-fuel fire needed to spark a terrorist into being.
That’s no specific proposal. The fact that you think it is suggests that you haven’t talked seriously to people who make public policy but only to people on the internet who are as far removed from political processes as you are.
It’s like people who are outside of mathematical academia writing proofs for important mathematical problems. They usually think that their proofs are correct because they aren’t specific enough about them to see the problems that exist with them.
If your whining about spelling errors is the best shot you have,
I read one post and gave my impression of it. The spelling errors reduce the likelihood that reading other posts would be valuable, so I stopped at that point. If you are actually interested in spreading your ideas, that’s valuable information for you.
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.
Hi from San Diego, California. I’m an attorney with academic training in molecular biology (BS, MS, PhD). I have an intense interest in politics, specifically the cognitive biology/social science of politics. I’m currently reading The Rationalizing Voter by Lodge and Taber. I have read both of Tetlock’s books, Haidt’s Righteous Mind, Khaneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Thaler’s Nudge, Achen and Bartels Democracy for Realists and a few others. I also took a college-level MOOC on cognitive biology and attendant analytic techniques (fMRI, etc) and one on the biology of decision making in economics.
Based on what I have taught myself over the last 6-7 years, I came up with a new “objective” political ideology or set of morals that I thought could be used to at least modestly displace or supplement standard “subjective” ideologies including liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, socialism, Christianity, anarchy, racism, nationalism and so on. The point of this was an attempt to build an intellectual framework that could help to at least partially rationalize politics, which I see as mostly incoherent/irrational from my “objective” public-interest oriented point of view.
I have tried to explain myself to both lay audiences (I’m currently a moderator at Harlen’s Place, a politics site on Disqus https://disqus.com/home/channel/harlansplace/ ), but have failed. I confess that I’m becoming discouraged at the possibility of applying cognitive and social science to even slightly rationalize politics. What both Haidt and Lodge/Tabor have to say, makes me think that what I am trying is futile. I have tried contact about 50-60 academics, including Tetlock, Haidt, Bartels and Taber, but none have responded with any substance (one got very annoyed and chewed me out for wasting his time; http://www.overcomingbias.com/ ) - most don’t respond at all. I get that—everyone is busy and crackpots with new ideas are a dime a thousand.
Anyway, I stumbled across this site this morning while looking for some online content about the affect heuristic. I thought I would introduce myself and try to fit in, if I’m up to the standards here. My interest is in trying to open a dialog with one or more people who know this science better than myself so that I can get some feedback one whether what I am trying to do is a waste of time. As a novice, I suspect that I misunderstand the science and overestimate the limits of human rationality in politics in a society that lives under the US constitution (free speech).
My blog is here: http://dispol.blogspot.com/
First impressions from skim reading the blog:
That points for me into the direction of objectivism with all it’s problems. There are good reasons to be quite suspicious when someone claims that they don’t have an ideology and there views are simply “objective”.
To me saying something like that without bringing forward a specific proposal suggests to me politcal ignorance.
The blog isn’t spell-checked.
I have been arguing and debating politics online for over 7 years now and I am quite used to how people speak to each other. There is nothing at all politically ignorant in my comment. When I say something is obvious, it has to be taken in the context of the entire post. It’s easy to cherry pick and criticize by the well-known and popular practice of out-of-context distortion of a snippet on content in a bigger context. I have seen that tactic dozens of times and I reject it. It’s cheap shot and nothing more. You can do better. Bring it on.
My blog and all of my other online content speaks directly to the American people in their own language. I do not address academics in academic language. I have tried academic language with the general public and it doesn’t work. Here’s a news flash: There is an astonishing number of average adult Americans who have little or no trust in most any kind of science, social and cognitive science included. As soon as one resorts to the language of science, or even mentions something as “technical” as “cognitive science”, red flags go up in many people and their minds automatically switch to conscious rationalization mode. My guess is that anti-science attitude applies to about 40-60% of adult Americans if my online experience is a reasonably accurate indicator. (my personal experience database is based on roughly 600-1,000 people—no, I am not so stupid as to think that is definitive, it’s just my personal experience)
I am trying to foster the spread of the idea that maybe, just maybe, politics might be rationalized at least enough to make some detectable difference for the better in the real world. My world is firmly based in messy, chaotic online retail politics, not any pristine, controlled laboratory or academic lecture room environment.
Political ignorance is in the eye of the beholder. You see it in me and I see it in you.
By the way, reread the blog post you criticize as making no specific proposal. There is a specific proposal there: based on the social science, remove fuel 1 from the two-fuel fire needed to spark a terrorist into being. How did you miss it? Did you read what I said, or did your eye simply float down to the offending phrase and that triggered your unconscious, irrational attack response?
I do appreciate your comment on the review of Achen and Bartel’s book. If your whining about spelling errors is the best shot you have, then I am satisfied that I understand the book well enough to use to to leverage my arguments when I cross swords with non-science, real people in the real world. I have no interest in basing my politics on my misunderstanding of areas of science that are outside my formal academic training. I need to be as accurate and honest as I can so that people can’t dismiss my arguments for rationality as based in ignorance, stupidity and/or mendacity. That’s another cheap shot tactic I come across with some regularity. The only defense against that attack is to be correct.
Shall we continue our dance, or is this OK for you?
That’s the problem. Most relevant political discussions that have real world effects don’t happen online. Knowing how to debate politics online and actual knowing how politics processes work are two different things.
That’s no specific proposal. The fact that you think it is suggests that you haven’t talked seriously to people who make public policy but only to people on the internet who are as far removed from political processes as you are.
It’s like people who are outside of mathematical academia writing proofs for important mathematical problems. They usually think that their proofs are correct because they aren’t specific enough about them to see the problems that exist with them.
I read one post and gave my impression of it. The spelling errors reduce the likelihood that reading other posts would be valuable, so I stopped at that point. If you are actually interested in spreading your ideas, that’s valuable information for you.
Is a short summary of your ideology or set of morals available somewhere on the ’net?
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.