One idea is to produce entertainment with rationalist themes (books, movies, TV shows). Methods is a good start, but much more could be done here. Not sure if anyone’s working on stuff like this though. Hopefully a past or future workshop participant will get on this.
“More rationalists” seems like slightly the wrong way to think about the goal here, which to me should really be to increase the power of the rationalist community. This doesn’t imply going after large gains in numbers so much as going after powerful people. For example, in a conversation I had at the workshop it was pointed out to me that some governmental agency that determines funding for medical research doesn’t classify aging as a disease, so researchers can’t get certain kinds of funds for aging research (I may be misremembering the details here but that was the gist of it). The easiest way I can think of to fix this problem is for the rationalist community to have friends in politics. I don’t know if that’s currently the case.
So we should focus on increasing our social skills, with the specific goal of befriending influential people, and influence politics. Without officially becoming politicians ourselves, because that messes with one’s brain. Unless we consciously decide to sacrifice a few of us.
Can we agree on which political goals would be desirable? Funding for aging research seems like a good candidate. (Even a libertarial opposed to any kind of taxation and government spending could agree that assuming the government already takes the money and spends it anyway, it is better if the money is spent on aging research, as opposed to research of rare diseases of cute puppies.) Opposing obvious stupidities could be other thing. Unfortunately, no politician can become popular by doing nothing else but opposing obvious stupidities, although I personally would love to see more such politicians.
Then we would need a proper protocol on sacrificing rationalists for politics. A rationalist who becomes a politician could fix a lot of things, but inevitably they would stop being a rationalist. I guess it is impossible to keep a functioning mind… and even if by some miracle one could do it, then they could not discuss their opinions and goals on LW openly anyway.
Actually, a LW community could easily ruin a rational politician’s career by asking them questions where a honest answer means political suicide, but a less-than-honest answer is easily disproved by the community. Imagine a Prisonners’ Dilemma among politicians where two politicians agree to support each other’s ideas for mutual benefit. Each of them dislikes the other idea, but considers the world with both of them better than the world with none of them. But for the plan to work, both of the politicians must pretend to support both ideas wholeheartedly. And now the LW community would openly ask the former rationalist politician about the other idea, and present their own speculations about the motives; an saying “please, for greater utility, let’s not discuss this” would probably have the opposite effect.
So there would need to be some firewall between the politician and the community. For example that the politician discusses with the community only in specific articles, where it is allowed to discuss only the explicitly allowed topics. (You could send the politician a PM suggesting a new topic, but you would be forbidden to say publicly that you did so.)
So we should focus on increasing our social skills, with the specific goal of befriending influential people, and influence politics. Without officially becoming politicians ourselves, because that messes with one’s brain. Unless we consciously decide to sacrifice a few of us.
I cannot determine whether this is presented ironically.
Politics is the mindkiller. But if rational people refuse to participate in politics, then all policy will be decided by irrational people, which is not good.
As the linked articles says, Bayesians should not lose against Barbarians. Rationalists should win; not invent clever rationalizations for losing. We should one-box in Newcomb’s Problem, instead of complaining that the choice is unfair against our preconceptions of rationality.
I don’t want to ever hear this: “Eliezer told me that politics is the mindkiller, so I refused to participate in politics, and now my children learn mandatory religion and creationism at school, cryonics and polyamory are illegal, the AI research is focused on creating a supermachine that believes in god and democracy… and it all sucks, but my duty as a rationalist was to avoid politics, and I followed my duty.”
So what is the solution?
Learn to influence the politics while protecting yourself from most of the mindkilling. If that turns out to be impossible or very ineffective, then select a group of people who will use their rationality to become skilled politicians and shape the society towards greater utility, even if they lose their rationality in the process… and be prepared to deal with this loss. Be prepared for a moment when you have to say to the given person “we don’t consider you rational anymore” or even “supporting you now would make the world worse”. The idea is that the person should make the world better (compared with someone else getting the office) before this happens. We should evaluate carefully how much likely it is for the specific person; perhaps make some preparations to increase the likelihood.
It is also perhaps useful to distinguish between “talk about politics in unfocused gatherings with large undifferentiated groups of people,” “talk about politics in focused gatherings with selected groups of people,” and “take steps to affect policy.” It might turn out that there are good reasons to avoid politics in the first case while not avoiding it all in the latter two.
It’s probably not so much the mandatory tribalism that makes people apathetic to working with politics, but more like the thing in this Moldbug quote via patrissimo:
You’re trying to replace Windows with Linux. Great.
Your way of replacing Windows with Linux: install Linux as a set of Word macros, one macro at a time. (You’d need something like Emscripten for Word macro.) Oh, also—Linux doesn’t exist. So you’re actually building Linux as a set of Word macros, one macro at a time. Oh, and you have no distribution mechanism. Your users need to type in the macros themselves.
Are the Word users fed up with Word? Oh, man. They’ve had it up to here with Word. So what?
Tech-minded people want to solve problems. They look at politics and see a lifetime of staring at countless problems while stuck in a system that will let them solve almost none of them and being barraged with an endless stream of trivial annoyances.
Wouldn’t it be easier to use your rationality to amass huge amounts of wealth, then simply buy whatever politicians you need, just like other rich people do ?
I don’t know how much control rich people really have over politicians.
When someone becomes a successful politician, they have means to get money. The more money they have, the more it costs to buy them. And they probably get different offers from different rich people, sometimes wanting them to do contradictory things, so they can choose to accept bribes compatible with their own opinions.
Also I suspect that when you have enough money, more money becomes meaningless, and the real currency is the power to influence each other. For example, if you already have 10 billlion dollars, instead of even another 50 billion dollars you would prefer a “friend” who can get you out of jail free if that ever becomes necessary. So maybe from some level higher, you have to hold an office to be able to provide something valuable to others who hold an office.
But if having enough money really is enough to improve the world, then certainly, we should do that.
Well, firstly, you don’t need to buy a whole politician (though it doesn’t hurt); you only need to buy the legislation you need. Thus you don’t care how your politician votes on gay marriage or veteran’s benefits or whatever, as long he is voting for Bill #1234567.8, which you sponsored, and which deals with protecting squirrel habitats (because you really like squirrels, just for example). This is good, because it’s not enough to just have one politician, you need a bunch of them, and it’s cheaper to just buy their votes piecemeal.
Secondly, you are of course correct about politicians getting money from different sources, but hey, that’s the free market for you. On the other hand, politicians aren’t really all that rich. Sure, they may be millionaires, and a few might be billionaires, but the $50e9 figure that you mentioned would be unimaginable to any of them. If you really had that much money (and were smart about using it), you would be able to buy not merely a single politicians, but entire committees, wholesale.
One idea is to produce entertainment with rationalist themes (books, movies, TV shows). Methods is a good start, but much more could be done here. Not sure if anyone’s working on stuff like this though. Hopefully a past or future workshop participant will get on this.
“More rationalists” seems like slightly the wrong way to think about the goal here, which to me should really be to increase the power of the rationalist community. This doesn’t imply going after large gains in numbers so much as going after powerful people. For example, in a conversation I had at the workshop it was pointed out to me that some governmental agency that determines funding for medical research doesn’t classify aging as a disease, so researchers can’t get certain kinds of funds for aging research (I may be misremembering the details here but that was the gist of it). The easiest way I can think of to fix this problem is for the rationalist community to have friends in politics. I don’t know if that’s currently the case.
So we should focus on increasing our social skills, with the specific goal of befriending influential people, and influence politics. Without officially becoming politicians ourselves, because that messes with one’s brain. Unless we consciously decide to sacrifice a few of us.
Can we agree on which political goals would be desirable? Funding for aging research seems like a good candidate. (Even a libertarial opposed to any kind of taxation and government spending could agree that assuming the government already takes the money and spends it anyway, it is better if the money is spent on aging research, as opposed to research of rare diseases of cute puppies.) Opposing obvious stupidities could be other thing. Unfortunately, no politician can become popular by doing nothing else but opposing obvious stupidities, although I personally would love to see more such politicians.
Then we would need a proper protocol on sacrificing rationalists for politics. A rationalist who becomes a politician could fix a lot of things, but inevitably they would stop being a rationalist. I guess it is impossible to keep a functioning mind… and even if by some miracle one could do it, then they could not discuss their opinions and goals on LW openly anyway.
Actually, a LW community could easily ruin a rational politician’s career by asking them questions where a honest answer means political suicide, but a less-than-honest answer is easily disproved by the community. Imagine a Prisonners’ Dilemma among politicians where two politicians agree to support each other’s ideas for mutual benefit. Each of them dislikes the other idea, but considers the world with both of them better than the world with none of them. But for the plan to work, both of the politicians must pretend to support both ideas wholeheartedly. And now the LW community would openly ask the former rationalist politician about the other idea, and present their own speculations about the motives; an saying “please, for greater utility, let’s not discuss this” would probably have the opposite effect.
So there would need to be some firewall between the politician and the community. For example that the politician discusses with the community only in specific articles, where it is allowed to discuss only the explicitly allowed topics. (You could send the politician a PM suggesting a new topic, but you would be forbidden to say publicly that you did so.)
I cannot determine whether this is presented ironically.
Completely seriously.
Politics is the mindkiller. But if rational people refuse to participate in politics, then all policy will be decided by irrational people, which is not good.
As the linked articles says, Bayesians should not lose against Barbarians. Rationalists should win; not invent clever rationalizations for losing. We should one-box in Newcomb’s Problem, instead of complaining that the choice is unfair against our preconceptions of rationality.
I don’t want to ever hear this: “Eliezer told me that politics is the mindkiller, so I refused to participate in politics, and now my children learn mandatory religion and creationism at school, cryonics and polyamory are illegal, the AI research is focused on creating a supermachine that believes in god and democracy… and it all sucks, but my duty as a rationalist was to avoid politics, and I followed my duty.”
So what is the solution?
Learn to influence the politics while protecting yourself from most of the mindkilling. If that turns out to be impossible or very ineffective, then select a group of people who will use their rationality to become skilled politicians and shape the society towards greater utility, even if they lose their rationality in the process… and be prepared to deal with this loss. Be prepared for a moment when you have to say to the given person “we don’t consider you rational anymore” or even “supporting you now would make the world worse”. The idea is that the person should make the world better (compared with someone else getting the office) before this happens. We should evaluate carefully how much likely it is for the specific person; perhaps make some preparations to increase the likelihood.
It is also perhaps useful to distinguish between “talk about politics in unfocused gatherings with large undifferentiated groups of people,” “talk about politics in focused gatherings with selected groups of people,” and “take steps to affect policy.” It might turn out that there are good reasons to avoid politics in the first case while not avoiding it all in the latter two.
It’s probably not so much the mandatory tribalism that makes people apathetic to working with politics, but more like the thing in this Moldbug quote via patrissimo:
Tech-minded people want to solve problems. They look at politics and see a lifetime of staring at countless problems while stuck in a system that will let them solve almost none of them and being barraged with an endless stream of trivial annoyances.
Wouldn’t it be easier to use your rationality to amass huge amounts of wealth, then simply buy whatever politicians you need, just like other rich people do ?
I don’t know how much control rich people really have over politicians.
When someone becomes a successful politician, they have means to get money. The more money they have, the more it costs to buy them. And they probably get different offers from different rich people, sometimes wanting them to do contradictory things, so they can choose to accept bribes compatible with their own opinions.
Also I suspect that when you have enough money, more money becomes meaningless, and the real currency is the power to influence each other. For example, if you already have 10 billlion dollars, instead of even another 50 billion dollars you would prefer a “friend” who can get you out of jail free if that ever becomes necessary. So maybe from some level higher, you have to hold an office to be able to provide something valuable to others who hold an office.
But if having enough money really is enough to improve the world, then certainly, we should do that.
Well, firstly, you don’t need to buy a whole politician (though it doesn’t hurt); you only need to buy the legislation you need. Thus you don’t care how your politician votes on gay marriage or veteran’s benefits or whatever, as long he is voting for Bill #1234567.8, which you sponsored, and which deals with protecting squirrel habitats (because you really like squirrels, just for example). This is good, because it’s not enough to just have one politician, you need a bunch of them, and it’s cheaper to just buy their votes piecemeal.
Secondly, you are of course correct about politicians getting money from different sources, but hey, that’s the free market for you. On the other hand, politicians aren’t really all that rich. Sure, they may be millionaires, and a few might be billionaires, but the $50e9 figure that you mentioned would be unimaginable to any of them. If you really had that much money (and were smart about using it), you would be able to buy not merely a single politicians, but entire committees, wholesale.