I guess it’s not clear to me what LessWrong could contribute to political discussion that you can’t get elsewhere.
People here generally put in their due diligence in constructing reasoned well-sourced arguments, tend to admit when they were wrong on something and most importantly force you to look at your own assumptions. That puts it leaps and bounds over any other political debate I’ve ever seen.
If a group of economists and other relevant experts were polled on various policy matters and compared to the answers reached by LessWrong users if policy was discussed on LessWrong, how much do you think the answers would differ, and would it be the experts’ errors or LessWrong’s errors causing whatever discrepancies?
This depends a lot on the proportions of the economists that are from each school and what constitutes “other experts.”
If you get a representative slice of economists, I’d expect much better predictive value on any given policy than LW because a) they have a quite a bit more expertise dealing with the models and b) we’ve got a lot of Austrian School / Prediction Markets people here to skew away from the consensus. If you weight them too heavily to any one school, especially the really funky ones, then you might see us start to pull closer but I still doubt the gap would close.
If you get a representative slice of Sociologists, PoliSci folks, X-studies professors and whatever other political talking heads you can find in academia and put them in a room together, it’ll disprove the notion of a just universe when the building isn’t hit immediately by an asteroid. And they’ll also be wrong much more than LW, although we still wouldn’t beat any of the handful of real scientists hiding in the back (Anthropologists / Social Psychologists mostly).
I’m not saying we’re some kind of amazing truth engine here, just that this is an abnormally reasonable environment with a lot of abnormally smart and well educated people.
People here generally put in their due diligence in constructing reasoned well-sourced arguments, tend to admit when they were wrong on something and most importantly force you to look at your own assumptions. That puts it leaps and bounds over any other political debate I’ve ever seen.
If a group of economists and other relevant experts were polled on various policy matters and compared to the answers reached by LessWrong users if policy was discussed on LessWrong, how much do you think the answers would differ, and would it be the experts’ errors or LessWrong’s errors causing whatever discrepancies?
This depends a lot on the proportions of the economists that are from each school and what constitutes “other experts.”
If you get a representative slice of economists, I’d expect much better predictive value on any given policy than LW because a) they have a quite a bit more expertise dealing with the models and b) we’ve got a lot of Austrian School / Prediction Markets people here to skew away from the consensus. If you weight them too heavily to any one school, especially the really funky ones, then you might see us start to pull closer but I still doubt the gap would close.
If you get a representative slice of Sociologists, PoliSci folks, X-studies professors and whatever other political talking heads you can find in academia and put them in a room together, it’ll disprove the notion of a just universe when the building isn’t hit immediately by an asteroid. And they’ll also be wrong much more than LW, although we still wouldn’t beat any of the handful of real scientists hiding in the back (Anthropologists / Social Psychologists mostly).
I’m not saying we’re some kind of amazing truth engine here, just that this is an abnormally reasonable environment with a lot of abnormally smart and well educated people.