The people who want to abolish patents would presumably also support shortening them and being more selective about granting them.
Shortening patent duration is a policy question but I’m not sure that everyone wants to short pharma patents.
If we want to live to 1000 years it’s useful to have a way for the inventor of a drug to make a lot of money.
Be more selective about granting patents isn’t a direct policy question.
It a vague fell good position.
We might very well disagree over specific approaches to be more selective about granting patents.
For constructive political discourse it’s not good to focus on agreeing on a problem. You have to agree on solutions.
Politicians do that; doesn’t mean people here do. And even so, that doesn’t prevent identifying particular deductions that everyone wants to eliminate.
And even so, that doesn’t prevent identifying particular deductions that everyone wants to eliminate.
I know few nonlibertatiran people who want to get rid of tax deductions that they themselves use to pay less taxes.
Most of the time when everyone agrees to want to eliminate a particular deduction, it’s just that the people who discuss the deduction lack the understanding of the tax system to understand why that deduction exists. That’s a bad place to be to advocate political change.
But they would support improving it given that there is going to be one
Not every school teaches exactly the same thing. If you put a lot of energy into curricula development you make it more likely that all schools will get forced to follow the curricula.
I’m confused about what you’re trying to accomplish with this discussion: Yes, the areas I suggested for agreement between liberals and libertarians were general and vague. The point was to cover the wide variety of possible issues, not actually identify specific policy options to agree on.
You seems like you’re trying to win an argument but I have no idea what the argument is.
I also feel like the model you are using for different political actors is based on random partisans who aren’t very thoughtful or nuanced. That doesn’t seem like the right model for Less Wrong. Liberal policy wonks routinely write about getting rid of particular tax deductions. If everyone here researched the mortgage interest tax deduction for a month I’m quite sure the progressives would mostly be on board with eliminating it. My reason for thinking this is that I live in Washington DC and hang out with a bunch of lawyers and law students who have thought about such issues for more than two seconds and tend to converge.
I don’t really want to dig into IP reform proposals to locate specific ideas with broad approval. I haven’t the time. But progressive and libertarian bloggers and writers who think about IP often have similar ideas. Obviously progressives focus more on ideas like using government awards as incentives and libertarians focus more on shortening or eliminating certain classes of IP. Agreeing on problems is how you start. Then you start talking about solutions and see if any get agreed upon. How do we get the patent office to stop issuing silly, duplicate tech patents? Not every solution will appease everyone but it’s an actual starting point because it is a concrete problem everyone wants to fix. Compare to: “how can we make the tax code more progressive?”
I’m confused about what you’re trying to accomplish with this discussion: Yes, the areas I suggested for agreement between liberals and libertarians were general and vague. The point was to cover the wide variety of possible issues, not actually identify specific policy options to agree on.
Policy debates should not appear one sided. At the moment at which it seems to you that as issue is completely on sided it’s likely that you don’t understand the actual issues that are at stake.
I also feel like the model you are using for different political actors is based on random partisans
No, my model of political actors is partly based on people actual political power in Berlin, which is the city I inhabit.
My reason for thinking this is that I live in Washington DC and hang out with a bunch of lawyers and law students who have thought about such issues for more than two seconds and tend to converge.
Basically you discussed law with people who aren’t trained to think politically about law but technically about it.
Those people might be thoughtful about the technicality but that doesn’t mean that they are thoughtful about the politics behind the law.
I think you make a mistake when you assume that the way lawyers think about laws is representative to how thoughtful people in general think about laws.
I think people on LessWrong agree that Robert Hanson is in general a thoughtful person. Look at this post . There he proposes a way to make our tax system even more complicated.
If you would ask Robert Hanson whether he wanted an easier tax code he would say yes. On the other hand he still makes proposals for increasing it’s complexity. He isn’t even a progressive who’s big on government intervention in markets.
If someone like Robert Hanson isn’t committed to tax code simplicity, why do you expect an average LessWrong reader to be committed to that idea?
If everyone here researched the mortgage interest tax deduction for a month I’m quite sure the progressives would mostly be on board with eliminating it.
If you get rid of the mortgage interest tax deduction, do you also get rid of support for 401k plans? If not, why do the people who buy real estage for their retirement get less support from the government than the people who invest in 401k plans?
If we don’t have government incentives that get people to invest for their retirement, what does society do with those old broke people who can still vote?
My point is really simple actually which is why this extended exchange is so confusing. The question was basically: what are things liberals and libertarians can agree on. I just answered empirically. Look up the opinions of prominent American liberal writers, bloggers, think tanks and wonks on the mortgage interest tax deduction. Look up the opinions of their libertarian counterparts. Look at what economists say about it. There is a ton of agreement!
Basically you discussed law with people who aren’t trained to think politically about law but technically about it. Those people might be thoughtful about the technicality but that doesn’t mean that they are thoughtful about the politics behind the law.
Your model of DC lawyers is just broken. I don’t know what to tell you. They spend probably an order of magnitude more time thinking about the politics of law than they do just learning doctrine.
No, my model of political actors is partly based on people actual political power in Berlin, which is the city I inhabit.
Politicians seem like obviously the wrong place to look for unmotivated, reasoned discourse about policy. The mortgage interest tax deduction, for instance, is very popular because people like getting free money. In the States, people with houses vote at higher rates than renters, tend to make up the narrow slice of undecided voters that determine elections. Moreover, because of framing effects renters don’t see it as the tax on renting that it actually is. So American politicians aren’t especially motivated to get rid of it even though plenty of them have heard from economists and technocrats that it is bad policy.
I’m unfortunately, not very knowledgeable about German politics (and apologies for the cultural hegemony of American politics) but I suspect German politicians are similarly more concerned with getting elected than promoting good policy (when the two conflict).
Policy debates should not appear one sided. At the moment at which it seems to you that as issue is completely on sided it’s likely that you don’t understand the actual issues that are at stake.
One place where were are very likely to find low-hanging fruit of one-sided policy proposals is with the very policies it would be hardest to change. This goes for corporate subsidies, popular tax deductions, drug legalization, reform of the prison system etc.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided because if they actually were one sided they would probably have been implemented! It would be the heroic cause of a problem-solving politician. And so the mantra against one-sidedness makes sense for any policy debate in a legislature or an election and most of the policy debates the pit ends of the political spectrum against each other. But there are cases where a policy is not implemented or championed—not because it has much in the way of two sides, but because there is some other barrier preventing it from being popularized and implemented. I mentioned corporate subsidies in my initial post. They don’t poll well. Both sides claim to oppose them. And they’re bad policy. They persist because the coalition that benefits from them cares a lot more about them than the coalition that opposes them. So there are votes and financial support for maintaining or increasing them but opposing them won’t yield any comparative political benefit.
I suspect there are a number of other one-sided policies that still go unimplemented due, not just to the structure and arrangement of interests but to cognitive biases in the way voters and politicians think about policy. Risk aversion, scope insensitivity, attention span, cognitive sophistication and in particular framing effects are going to make some good policies broadly unpopular with the median voter and cause politicians to shy away. This is the obvious place to look for the low-hanging fruit of a rationalist politics.
Which isn’t to say that whole last paragraph isn’t a minefield of possible bias blind spots and paternalism.
The question was basically: what are things liberals and libertarians can agree on.
No, it wasn’t. The question is about issues where liberals and libertarians can together engage in effective political action.
I’m unfortunately, not very knowledgeable about German politics (and apologies for the cultural hegemony of American politics) but I suspect German politicians are similarly more concerned with getting elected than promoting good policy (when the two conflict).
In general in US politics it’s more important for politicians to impress corporate donors while in German politics it’s important for politicians to impress fellow members of the same political party. Party members that go to regular party meetings. It’s not like in the US where being a party member is about registering and then voting in primary elections.
Politicians seem like obviously the wrong place to look for unmotivated, reasoned discourse about policy.
Politics is inherently about the motivations of people. If you want to shield yourself from motivations then my charge of you and your DC Lawyer friends being educated about technical details of policy but not political ones is entirely accurate.
Of course you can start your blog and write a hundred blog posts about how the mortage tax deduction is crap but that won’t have any meaningful political impact if you don’t start taking people motivations into account and participate in motivated political discourse.
If you want to start to model political actors, it’s important to model people with motivations.
The idea that you can effectively model political actors without doing so, is strange to myself.
That said politicians do have some personal political views that deviate from their party line and which they don’t hold because holding them is politically advantageous. In informal setting you can talk about them and why those views aren’t party line.
Take the war on drugs. I know the background of the politics of how we in the city of Berlin doubled the amount of marijuana that one can carry around without being charged with a crime.
One place where were are very likely to find low-hanging fruit of one-sided policy proposals is with the very policies it would be hardest to change.
Being rational is about winning, so stop thinking of the policies that are hardest to change as low-hanging fruits.
No, it wasn’t. The question is about issues where liberals and libertarians can together engage in effective political action.
No! That was never the question.
From the post:
Instead, I believe there are projects which could appeal to rationalists across a wide range of the political spectrum. A couple I can think of are opposing the war on drugs and improving judicial systems. Any other suggestions?
I was giving more suggestions of places where a lot of LWer might find agreement. And since the major political split seems to be left vs libertarian (with a vocal minority of rightists) the natural way to start was to look at what issues liberals and libertarians end up agreeing on when they study policy issues! This explains why this entire exchange has been so odd: like you were making demands of me when all I was doing was answering a question.
Politics is inherently about the motivations of people. If you want to shield yourself from motivations
Good lord… yes, I know that. But we’re trying to find out what people in the Less Wrong community could cooperate on, not solve politics.
I’m not trying to model any political actor. I’m trying to model LW people as political actors. That’s the point of the exercise.
Being rational is about winning, so stop thinking of the policies that are hardest to change as low-hanging fruits.
Low-hanging fruit as possibilities for agreement in this community. Not low-hanging as possibilities for actually changing something. Nevertheless, “hardest to change” policies might be the policies one has most confidence in being correct and that can conceivably outweigh easier to change but more more ambiguous policies. Hard to change also often means that the issue presently has little political interest such that the marginal difference of a small number of people doing something is higher. Immigration policy (say) might be much easier to change but joining in that shouting match is not likely to make a significant difference.
The question was basically: what are things liberals and libertarians can agree on.
Not exactly, though I probably gave that impression because that’s the two sorts of people I get along best with. A conservative/libertarian coalition could be worthwhile, and I can dream that there might be projects that would pull in a really wide range of rationalists.
One thing that I should have brought up is that my point of view is very American. There may well be collaborations and projects which are more oriented towards other parts of the world.
My reason for thinking this is that I live in Washington DC and hang out with a bunch of lawyers and law students who have thought about such issues for more than two seconds and tend to converge.
Yes, given that they’re all in the same business and in the same place and thus benefit from the same subset of tax deductions and have had similar life experiences I don’t see how this contradicts Christian’s point. Also the key question is not how long they’ve thought about the issue but whether they have thought about it from perspectives other then their own and how many different perspectives they’ve thought about it from.
Also the key question is not how long they’ve thought about the issue but whether they have thought about it from perspectives other then their own and how many different perspectives they’ve thought about it from.
I disagree that that is the key question. I have a model of a person slightly less smart than the average Less Wronger but who has thought quite a bit more about tax policy. These people tend to converge on similar views about tax policy. The fact that this group generally doesn’t benefit from most tax deductions certainly may make it easier to oppose them: but that isn’t an argument that they are biased. Obviously it is those who benefit from particular deductions whose judgments we ought to be suspicious of.
That’s why, after all, these deductions remain in place despite being really bad policy. They benefit the groups that sway elections.
Shortening patent duration is a policy question but I’m not sure that everyone wants to short pharma patents. If we want to live to 1000 years it’s useful to have a way for the inventor of a drug to make a lot of money.
Be more selective about granting patents isn’t a direct policy question. It a vague fell good position.
We might very well disagree over specific approaches to be more selective about granting patents. For constructive political discourse it’s not good to focus on agreeing on a problem. You have to agree on solutions.
I know few nonlibertatiran people who want to get rid of tax deductions that they themselves use to pay less taxes.
Most of the time when everyone agrees to want to eliminate a particular deduction, it’s just that the people who discuss the deduction lack the understanding of the tax system to understand why that deduction exists. That’s a bad place to be to advocate political change.
Not every school teaches exactly the same thing. If you put a lot of energy into curricula development you make it more likely that all schools will get forced to follow the curricula.
I’m confused about what you’re trying to accomplish with this discussion: Yes, the areas I suggested for agreement between liberals and libertarians were general and vague. The point was to cover the wide variety of possible issues, not actually identify specific policy options to agree on.
You seems like you’re trying to win an argument but I have no idea what the argument is.
I also feel like the model you are using for different political actors is based on random partisans who aren’t very thoughtful or nuanced. That doesn’t seem like the right model for Less Wrong. Liberal policy wonks routinely write about getting rid of particular tax deductions. If everyone here researched the mortgage interest tax deduction for a month I’m quite sure the progressives would mostly be on board with eliminating it. My reason for thinking this is that I live in Washington DC and hang out with a bunch of lawyers and law students who have thought about such issues for more than two seconds and tend to converge.
I don’t really want to dig into IP reform proposals to locate specific ideas with broad approval. I haven’t the time. But progressive and libertarian bloggers and writers who think about IP often have similar ideas. Obviously progressives focus more on ideas like using government awards as incentives and libertarians focus more on shortening or eliminating certain classes of IP. Agreeing on problems is how you start. Then you start talking about solutions and see if any get agreed upon. How do we get the patent office to stop issuing silly, duplicate tech patents? Not every solution will appease everyone but it’s an actual starting point because it is a concrete problem everyone wants to fix. Compare to: “how can we make the tax code more progressive?”
Policy debates should not appear one sided. At the moment at which it seems to you that as issue is completely on sided it’s likely that you don’t understand the actual issues that are at stake.
No, my model of political actors is partly based on people actual political power in Berlin, which is the city I inhabit.
Basically you discussed law with people who aren’t trained to think politically about law but technically about it. Those people might be thoughtful about the technicality but that doesn’t mean that they are thoughtful about the politics behind the law.
I think you make a mistake when you assume that the way lawyers think about laws is representative to how thoughtful people in general think about laws.
I think people on LessWrong agree that Robert Hanson is in general a thoughtful person. Look at this post . There he proposes a way to make our tax system even more complicated. If you would ask Robert Hanson whether he wanted an easier tax code he would say yes. On the other hand he still makes proposals for increasing it’s complexity. He isn’t even a progressive who’s big on government intervention in markets.
If someone like Robert Hanson isn’t committed to tax code simplicity, why do you expect an average LessWrong reader to be committed to that idea?
If you get rid of the mortgage interest tax deduction, do you also get rid of support for 401k plans? If not, why do the people who buy real estage for their retirement get less support from the government than the people who invest in 401k plans?
If we don’t have government incentives that get people to invest for their retirement, what does society do with those old broke people who can still vote?
My point is really simple actually which is why this extended exchange is so confusing. The question was basically: what are things liberals and libertarians can agree on. I just answered empirically. Look up the opinions of prominent American liberal writers, bloggers, think tanks and wonks on the mortgage interest tax deduction. Look up the opinions of their libertarian counterparts. Look at what economists say about it. There is a ton of agreement!
Your model of DC lawyers is just broken. I don’t know what to tell you. They spend probably an order of magnitude more time thinking about the politics of law than they do just learning doctrine.
Politicians seem like obviously the wrong place to look for unmotivated, reasoned discourse about policy. The mortgage interest tax deduction, for instance, is very popular because people like getting free money. In the States, people with houses vote at higher rates than renters, tend to make up the narrow slice of undecided voters that determine elections. Moreover, because of framing effects renters don’t see it as the tax on renting that it actually is. So American politicians aren’t especially motivated to get rid of it even though plenty of them have heard from economists and technocrats that it is bad policy.
I’m unfortunately, not very knowledgeable about German politics (and apologies for the cultural hegemony of American politics) but I suspect German politicians are similarly more concerned with getting elected than promoting good policy (when the two conflict).
One place where were are very likely to find low-hanging fruit of one-sided policy proposals is with the very policies it would be hardest to change. This goes for corporate subsidies, popular tax deductions, drug legalization, reform of the prison system etc.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided because if they actually were one sided they would probably have been implemented! It would be the heroic cause of a problem-solving politician. And so the mantra against one-sidedness makes sense for any policy debate in a legislature or an election and most of the policy debates the pit ends of the political spectrum against each other. But there are cases where a policy is not implemented or championed—not because it has much in the way of two sides, but because there is some other barrier preventing it from being popularized and implemented. I mentioned corporate subsidies in my initial post. They don’t poll well. Both sides claim to oppose them. And they’re bad policy. They persist because the coalition that benefits from them cares a lot more about them than the coalition that opposes them. So there are votes and financial support for maintaining or increasing them but opposing them won’t yield any comparative political benefit.
I suspect there are a number of other one-sided policies that still go unimplemented due, not just to the structure and arrangement of interests but to cognitive biases in the way voters and politicians think about policy. Risk aversion, scope insensitivity, attention span, cognitive sophistication and in particular framing effects are going to make some good policies broadly unpopular with the median voter and cause politicians to shy away. This is the obvious place to look for the low-hanging fruit of a rationalist politics.
Which isn’t to say that whole last paragraph isn’t a minefield of possible bias blind spots and paternalism.
No, it wasn’t. The question is about issues where liberals and libertarians can together engage in effective political action.
In general in US politics it’s more important for politicians to impress corporate donors while in German politics it’s important for politicians to impress fellow members of the same political party. Party members that go to regular party meetings. It’s not like in the US where being a party member is about registering and then voting in primary elections.
Politics is inherently about the motivations of people. If you want to shield yourself from motivations then my charge of you and your DC Lawyer friends being educated about technical details of policy but not political ones is entirely accurate.
Of course you can start your blog and write a hundred blog posts about how the mortage tax deduction is crap but that won’t have any meaningful political impact if you don’t start taking people motivations into account and participate in motivated political discourse.
If you want to start to model political actors, it’s important to model people with motivations. The idea that you can effectively model political actors without doing so, is strange to myself.
That said politicians do have some personal political views that deviate from their party line and which they don’t hold because holding them is politically advantageous. In informal setting you can talk about them and why those views aren’t party line.
Take the war on drugs. I know the background of the politics of how we in the city of Berlin doubled the amount of marijuana that one can carry around without being charged with a crime.
Being rational is about winning, so stop thinking of the policies that are hardest to change as low-hanging fruits.
No! That was never the question.
From the post:
I was giving more suggestions of places where a lot of LWer might find agreement. And since the major political split seems to be left vs libertarian (with a vocal minority of rightists) the natural way to start was to look at what issues liberals and libertarians end up agreeing on when they study policy issues! This explains why this entire exchange has been so odd: like you were making demands of me when all I was doing was answering a question.
Good lord… yes, I know that. But we’re trying to find out what people in the Less Wrong community could cooperate on, not solve politics.
I’m not trying to model any political actor. I’m trying to model LW people as political actors. That’s the point of the exercise.
Low-hanging fruit as possibilities for agreement in this community. Not low-hanging as possibilities for actually changing something. Nevertheless, “hardest to change” policies might be the policies one has most confidence in being correct and that can conceivably outweigh easier to change but more more ambiguous policies. Hard to change also often means that the issue presently has little political interest such that the marginal difference of a small number of people doing something is higher. Immigration policy (say) might be much easier to change but joining in that shouting match is not likely to make a significant difference.
Not exactly, though I probably gave that impression because that’s the two sorts of people I get along best with. A conservative/libertarian coalition could be worthwhile, and I can dream that there might be projects that would pull in a really wide range of rationalists.
One thing that I should have brought up is that my point of view is very American. There may well be collaborations and projects which are more oriented towards other parts of the world.
Right, I understood that. The liberal-libertarian thing was more the version of the question I answered.
Yes, given that they’re all in the same business and in the same place and thus benefit from the same subset of tax deductions and have had similar life experiences I don’t see how this contradicts Christian’s point. Also the key question is not how long they’ve thought about the issue but whether they have thought about it from perspectives other then their own and how many different perspectives they’ve thought about it from.
I disagree that that is the key question. I have a model of a person slightly less smart than the average Less Wronger but who has thought quite a bit more about tax policy. These people tend to converge on similar views about tax policy. The fact that this group generally doesn’t benefit from most tax deductions certainly may make it easier to oppose them: but that isn’t an argument that they are biased. Obviously it is those who benefit from particular deductions whose judgments we ought to be suspicious of.
That’s why, after all, these deductions remain in place despite being really bad policy. They benefit the groups that sway elections.