I supposed it’s not a popular topic because it rubs up against politics. But I do think that liberal democracy is the operating system for running things like LW, EA, and other communities we all love. It’s worth defending it—though what that means exactly is vague to me.
Defending liberal democracy is complex, because everyone wants to say that they are on the side of liberal democracy.
If you take the Verified Voting Foundation as one of the examples of highly recommended projects in the link, mainstream opinion these days is probably that their talking points are problematic because people might trust less in elections when the foundations speaks about the need for a more trustworthy election process.
While I personally believe that pushing for a more secure voting system is good, it’s a complex situation and many other projects in the space are similar. It’s easy for a project that’s funded for the purpose of strengthening liberal democracy to do the opposite.
I think this is a strong argument against “just do something that feels like it’s working toward liberal democracy”. But not against actually trying to work toward liberal democracy.
I think this is a subset of work on most important problems: time figuring out what to work on is surprisingly effective. People don’t do it as much as they should because it’s frustrating and doesn’t feel like it’s working toward a rewarding outcome.
For sure! It’s a devilishly hard problem. Despite dipping in and out of the topic, I don’t feel confident in even forming a problem statement about it. I feel more like one of the blind men touching different parts of an elephant.
But it seems like having many projects like the Verified Voting Foundation should hedge the risk—if each such project focuses on a small part, then the blast radius of unfortunate mistakes should be limited. I would just hope that, on average, we would be trending in the right direction.
One aspect of having many small projects is that it makes it harder to see the whole picture. It obfuscates and makes public criticism harder.
If someone builds a Ministery of Truth it’s easy to criticize it as an Orwellian attack on liberal democracy. If they instead distribute it over hundreds of different organizations, it’s a lot harder to conceptualize.
Indeed. One consideration is that the LW community used to be much less into policy adjacent stuff and hence much less relevant on that domain. Now, with AI governance becoming an increasingly big deal, I think we could potentially use some of that presence to push for certain things in defense.
Pushing for things in the genre of what Noah describes in the first piece I shared seems feasible for some people in policy.
When I last looked a couple of months back, I found very little discussion of this topic in the rationalist communities. The most interesting post was probably this one from 2021: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8cr7godn8qN9wjQYj/decreasing-populism-and-improving-democracy-evidence-based
I supposed it’s not a popular topic because it rubs up against politics. But I do think that liberal democracy is the operating system for running things like LW, EA, and other communities we all love. It’s worth defending it—though what that means exactly is vague to me.
Defending liberal democracy is complex, because everyone wants to say that they are on the side of liberal democracy.
If you take the Verified Voting Foundation as one of the examples of highly recommended projects in the link, mainstream opinion these days is probably that their talking points are problematic because people might trust less in elections when the foundations speaks about the need for a more trustworthy election process.
While I personally believe that pushing for a more secure voting system is good, it’s a complex situation and many other projects in the space are similar. It’s easy for a project that’s funded for the purpose of strengthening liberal democracy to do the opposite.
Sure, but that’s no reason not to try.
I think this is a strong argument against “just do something that feels like it’s working toward liberal democracy”. But not against actually trying to work toward liberal democracy.
I think this is a subset of work on most important problems: time figuring out what to work on is surprisingly effective. People don’t do it as much as they should because it’s frustrating and doesn’t feel like it’s working toward a rewarding outcome.
For sure! It’s a devilishly hard problem. Despite dipping in and out of the topic, I don’t feel confident in even forming a problem statement about it. I feel more like one of the blind men touching different parts of an elephant.
But it seems like having many projects like the Verified Voting Foundation should hedge the risk—if each such project focuses on a small part, then the blast radius of unfortunate mistakes should be limited. I would just hope that, on average, we would be trending in the right direction.
One aspect of having many small projects is that it makes it harder to see the whole picture. It obfuscates and makes public criticism harder.
If someone builds a Ministery of Truth it’s easy to criticize it as an Orwellian attack on liberal democracy. If they instead distribute it over hundreds of different organizations, it’s a lot harder to conceptualize.
Indeed. One consideration is that the LW community used to be much less into policy adjacent stuff and hence much less relevant on that domain. Now, with AI governance becoming an increasingly big deal, I think we could potentially use some of that presence to push for certain things in defense.
Pushing for things in the genre of what Noah describes in the first piece I shared seems feasible for some people in policy.