I intended to make something like the last claim here. I don’t need to shun political strategists, but I do think we should shun their methods.
Yes, perhaps current politics requires a level of dishonesty and manipulation (but I’d agree wuth your supposition that it is not usually at the level seen in Brexit,) and even if it’s critical for some people to engage in these dark arts for laudable goals (which is unclear, and certainly contrary to the goal of raising the sanity waterline,) Lesswrong will be worse off for trying to communally learn the lessons of how to lie to the public.
To use an analogy, learning how to be a pickpocket might be useful, and might even have benefits aside from theft, but I don’t want to need to guard my wallet, so if some of the people I knew started saying we should all learn to be better pickpockets, I’d want to spend less time with them.
My unease with studying Cumming’s ideas is not just because it’s horrific PR—though I think it is—and definitely not just because I don’t think it could teach anything, but because it is geared towards learning things which enhance distrust among people. Given that we’re otherwise involved in honest and truth-seeking conversations, this seems particularly bad. Otherwise, every conversation that even potentially relates to the real world becomes subject to lots of really bad epistemological pressures, with LWers trying to operate on simulacra level 2, or even worse, playing levels 3 and 4. In my view, that would be a tragic loss—so maybe we should avoid trying to get better.
My unease with studying Cumming’s ideas is not just because it’s horrific PR—though I think it is—and definitely not just because I don’t think it could teach anything, but because it is geared towards learning things which enhance distrust among people.
You could say the same thing about learning about the discourse that lead to the replication crisis. It’s a discourse about creating distrust among people.
Improving existing institutions is inherently about distrusting how they operate.
Improving existing institutions is inherently about distrusting how they operate.
That’s true, and a fair criticism, but the replication crisis was about object-level criticisms of the science—it certainly did not start with strategizing about convincing people to take political action.
You’ve replied several times in this thread and I still don’t know where your criticism and specifically the “dark arts” accusation (and now the analogy to theft) is coming from. Is it from reading Cummings, from reading Cummings’ critics, from guilt-by-association with the Brexit campaign, from following media coverage of Cummings, or what? What makes him uniquely bad?
EDIT: I saw this comment of yours, but I didn’t find it a satisfying answer—unless you’re willing to accuse all political strategists, and politicians of all political persuasions, of dark arts.
First, yes, I’ve read a fair amount of his writing, albeit only up to a couple years ago. And no, he’s not “uniquely bad”—quite the opposite. But I wouldn’t advise people interested in rationality to read about political strategy generally. Even though Cummings is significantly better than most—which I think he is, to clarify—that doesn’t mean it’s worth reading his material.
For those familiar with LW, I thought the distaste for politics was obvious. And yes, I think it’s rare for political strategists not to almost exclusively play level 3 and 4 simulacra games, and engage in what has been called dark arts of rationality on this blog for years.
Thanks, that clarifies things. I agree that frontpaged politics stuff has a good chance of doing more harm than good on LW. (EDIT: I originally had a typo saying “more good than harm” despite meaning the opposite.)
That said, do you think his writing on policy, rather than political strategy, has the same problem? I’ve read <5-ish essays from him, and while the Brexit stuff mostly seemed to be about political strategy, e.g. the Hollow Men essay was mostly about stories of ludiscrously dysfunctional institutions, terrible incentives throughout government, a systematic inability to fire incompetent people, people getting promoted to organisations with budgets and responsibilities which are far out of proportion to their own expertise, and so on.
These stories were surprising to me (and yet they seem quite plausible after following Covid policy in the last year), so I was in turn surprised when you said elsewhere that there was nothing to learn from him. Was that stuff obvious to you beforehand, or do you think he’s misrepresenting things, or what?
Or put differently, suppose I want my map to not have a blind spot around policy. Who or what could I read instead?
I’m happy to make more specific recommendations on how to think about policy, depending on what you’re looking for—but I’m generally happy recommending James Q. Wilson’s “Bureaucracy” and Eugene Bardach’s “A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis”—he former largely explains why things would be so dysfunctional, and the latter is a generally great introduction to understanding what policy analysis and interventions can do.
I intended to make something like the last claim here. I don’t need to shun political strategists, but I do think we should shun their methods.
Yes, perhaps current politics requires a level of dishonesty and manipulation (but I’d agree wuth your supposition that it is not usually at the level seen in Brexit,) and even if it’s critical for some people to engage in these dark arts for laudable goals (which is unclear, and certainly contrary to the goal of raising the sanity waterline,) Lesswrong will be worse off for trying to communally learn the lessons of how to lie to the public.
To use an analogy, learning how to be a pickpocket might be useful, and might even have benefits aside from theft, but I don’t want to need to guard my wallet, so if some of the people I knew started saying we should all learn to be better pickpockets, I’d want to spend less time with them.
My unease with studying Cumming’s ideas is not just because it’s horrific PR—though I think it is—and definitely not just because I don’t think it could teach anything, but because it is geared towards learning things which enhance distrust among people. Given that we’re otherwise involved in honest and truth-seeking conversations, this seems particularly bad. Otherwise, every conversation that even potentially relates to the real world becomes subject to lots of really bad epistemological pressures, with LWers trying to operate on simulacra level 2, or even worse, playing levels 3 and 4. In my view, that would be a tragic loss—so maybe we should avoid trying to get better.
You could say the same thing about learning about the discourse that lead to the replication crisis. It’s a discourse about creating distrust among people.
Improving existing institutions is inherently about distrusting how they operate.
That’s true, and a fair criticism, but the replication crisis was about object-level criticisms of the science—it certainly did not start with strategizing about convincing people to take political action.
You’ve replied several times in this thread and I still don’t know where your criticism and specifically the “dark arts” accusation (and now the analogy to theft) is coming from. Is it from reading Cummings, from reading Cummings’ critics, from guilt-by-association with the Brexit campaign, from following media coverage of Cummings, or what? What makes him uniquely bad?
EDIT: I saw this comment of yours, but I didn’t find it a satisfying answer—unless you’re willing to accuse all political strategists, and politicians of all political persuasions, of dark arts.
First, yes, I’ve read a fair amount of his writing, albeit only up to a couple years ago. And no, he’s not “uniquely bad”—quite the opposite. But I wouldn’t advise people interested in rationality to read about political strategy generally. Even though Cummings is significantly better than most—which I think he is, to clarify—that doesn’t mean it’s worth reading his material.
For those familiar with LW, I thought the distaste for politics was obvious. And yes, I think it’s rare for political strategists not to almost exclusively play level 3 and 4 simulacra games, and engage in what has been called dark arts of rationality on this blog for years.
Thanks, that clarifies things. I agree that frontpaged politics stuff has a good chance of doing more harm than good on LW. (EDIT: I originally had a typo saying “more good than harm” despite meaning the opposite.)
That said, do you think his writing on policy, rather than political strategy, has the same problem? I’ve read <5-ish essays from him, and while the Brexit stuff mostly seemed to be about political strategy, e.g. the Hollow Men essay was mostly about stories of ludiscrously dysfunctional institutions, terrible incentives throughout government, a systematic inability to fire incompetent people, people getting promoted to organisations with budgets and responsibilities which are far out of proportion to their own expertise, and so on.
These stories were surprising to me (and yet they seem quite plausible after following Covid policy in the last year), so I was in turn surprised when you said elsewhere that there was nothing to learn from him. Was that stuff obvious to you beforehand, or do you think he’s misrepresenting things, or what?
Or put differently, suppose I want my map to not have a blind spot around policy. Who or what could I read instead?
I’m happy to make more specific recommendations on how to think about policy, depending on what you’re looking for—but I’m generally happy recommending James Q. Wilson’s “Bureaucracy” and Eugene Bardach’s “A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis”—he former largely explains why things would be so dysfunctional, and the latter is a generally great introduction to understanding what policy analysis and interventions can do.