Given the power of mindkilling, the result could easily be an army of ex-altruistic ex-rationalists in politics. (Which wouldn’t necessarily be worse than the current state of politics, it just wouldn’t be the expected improvement.)
It’s not like a have a better plan, though. I was thinking along the line of “suppose that certain fraction of politicians will be responsible, and will seek advice among the experts… look at what algorithm they use to pick their advisors… and position yourself so that they pick you”.
But I suspect the algorithm would be something like “choose the most visible people already working in the domain you want to improve”. In which case my advice reduces to “the ‘life hack’ to improve domain X is to spend your life working in domain X and become successful and famous”, which sounds like doing things the hard way and being sufficiently lucky. (Maybe that is the optimal answer, dunno.)
The only point of intervention I see here is that we could notice the people who are doing the right thing, and try making them more visible, e.g. by writing articles about how they are doing the right thing. Which might slightly increase their chances of being picked as an advisor, compared to a person who is doing a wrong thing, but is good at climbing the hierarchy, so from outside seems like an equally qualified expert. In other words, instead of trying to place rationalists into domain X, just find people already in domain X who are relatively more rational than average, and try giving them more light.
Another potentially interesting project would be to create and publish a compilation of “rational policies on everything”, and allow politicians to steal the ideas from the book. Let your memes travel farther than you can. The question is whether we could even compile such book. Because it’s not just about technical answers, but also choosing your values. Often the choice is not between a policy that is “good” or “bad”, but “better for X and worse for Y” and “better for Y and worse for X”. Even the obviously bad choices usually have someone who derives some small benefit from status quo.
Given the power of mindkilling, the result could easily be an army of ex-altruistic ex-rationalists in politics. (Which wouldn’t necessarily be worse than the current state of politics, it just wouldn’t be the expected improvement.)
It’s not like a have a better plan, though. I was thinking along the line of “suppose that certain fraction of politicians will be responsible, and will seek advice among the experts… look at what algorithm they use to pick their advisors… and position yourself so that they pick you”.
But I suspect the algorithm would be something like “choose the most visible people already working in the domain you want to improve”. In which case my advice reduces to “the ‘life hack’ to improve domain X is to spend your life working in domain X and become successful and famous”, which sounds like doing things the hard way and being sufficiently lucky. (Maybe that is the optimal answer, dunno.)
The only point of intervention I see here is that we could notice the people who are doing the right thing, and try making them more visible, e.g. by writing articles about how they are doing the right thing. Which might slightly increase their chances of being picked as an advisor, compared to a person who is doing a wrong thing, but is good at climbing the hierarchy, so from outside seems like an equally qualified expert. In other words, instead of trying to place rationalists into domain X, just find people already in domain X who are relatively more rational than average, and try giving them more light.
Another potentially interesting project would be to create and publish a compilation of “rational policies on everything”, and allow politicians to steal the ideas from the book. Let your memes travel farther than you can. The question is whether we could even compile such book. Because it’s not just about technical answers, but also choosing your values. Often the choice is not between a policy that is “good” or “bad”, but “better for X and worse for Y” and “better for Y and worse for X”. Even the obviously bad choices usually have someone who derives some small benefit from status quo.