What did it take to ban slavery in Britain: TL;DR: Become the PM and propose laws which put foot in the door, by banning bad things in the new areas at least, and work from there. Also, be willing to die before seeing the effects Source: https://twitter.com/garius/status/1656679712775880705
The lack of any attempt at causal analysis is a pretty serious problem, for starters. It’s not clear to what extent these individual people were responsible for the abolition of slavery in Britain, as opposed to the rising opposition to slavery among the general public which slowly changed the incentives of politicians until banning slavery became more politically expedient than keeping it alive.
My model is that public opinion was what really mattered for the abolition of slavery in Britain. Indeed, e.g. the whole reason Castlereagh tried to get some anti-slavery commitments into the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 was that the public opposition to slavery had reached such a point that Liverpool’s government felt they had to make some kind of concession to them in order to keep the Whigs at bay. Otherwise, I think neither Liverpool nor Castlereagh cared much about the issue of slavery one way or the other.
Thanks for clarifying! I agree the twitter thread doesn’t look convincing.
IIUC your hypothesis, then translating it to AI Governance issue, it’s important to first get general public on your side, so that politicians find it in their interest to do something about it.
If so, then perhaps meanwhile we should provide those politicians with a set of experts they could outsource the problem of defining the right policy to? I suspect politicians do not write rules themselves in situations like that, they rather seek people considered experts by the public opinion? I worry, that politicians may want to use this occasion to win something more than public support, say money/favor from companies, and hence pick not the right experts/laws—hence perhaps it is important to not only work on public perception of the threat but also on who the public considers experts?
What did it take to ban slavery in Britain:
TL;DR: Become the PM and propose laws which put foot in the door, by banning bad things in the new areas at least, and work from there. Also, be willing to die before seeing the effects
Source: https://twitter.com/garius/status/1656679712775880705
I don’t think you can deduce anything about what it took to ban slavery from this tweet thread.
Why? (I see several interpretations of your comment)
The lack of any attempt at causal analysis is a pretty serious problem, for starters. It’s not clear to what extent these individual people were responsible for the abolition of slavery in Britain, as opposed to the rising opposition to slavery among the general public which slowly changed the incentives of politicians until banning slavery became more politically expedient than keeping it alive.
My model is that public opinion was what really mattered for the abolition of slavery in Britain. Indeed, e.g. the whole reason Castlereagh tried to get some anti-slavery commitments into the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 was that the public opposition to slavery had reached such a point that Liverpool’s government felt they had to make some kind of concession to them in order to keep the Whigs at bay. Otherwise, I think neither Liverpool nor Castlereagh cared much about the issue of slavery one way or the other.
Thanks for clarifying! I agree the twitter thread doesn’t look convincing.
IIUC your hypothesis, then translating it to AI Governance issue, it’s important to first get general public on your side, so that politicians find it in their interest to do something about it.
If so, then perhaps meanwhile we should provide those politicians with a set of experts they could outsource the problem of defining the right policy to? I suspect politicians do not write rules themselves in situations like that, they rather seek people considered experts by the public opinion? I worry, that politicians may want to use this occasion to win something more than public support, say money/favor from companies, and hence pick not the right experts/laws—hence perhaps it is important to not only work on public perception of the threat but also on who the public considers experts?