I think I agree with much-to-all of this. One further amplification I’d make about the last point: the culture of DC policymaking is one where people are expected to be quick studies and it’s OK to be new to a topic; talent is much more funged from topic to topic in response to changing priorities than you’d expect. Your Lesswrong-informed outside view of how much you need to know on a topic to start commenting on policy ideas is probably wrong.
(Yes, I know, someone is about to say “but what if you are WRONG about the big idea given weird corner case X or second-order effects Y?” Look, reversed stupidity is not wisdom, but also also sometimes you can just quickly identify stupid-across-almost-all-possible-worlds ideas and convince people just not to do them rather than having to advocate for an explicit good-idea alternative.)
I think I agree with much-to-all of this. One further amplification I’d make about the last point: the culture of DC policymaking is one where people are expected to be quick studies and it’s OK to be new to a topic; talent is much more funged from topic to topic in response to changing priorities than you’d expect. Your Lesswrong-informed outside view of how much you need to know on a topic to start commenting on policy ideas is probably wrong.
(Yes, I know, someone is about to say “but what if you are WRONG about the big idea given weird corner case X or second-order effects Y?” Look, reversed stupidity is not wisdom, but also also sometimes you can just quickly identify stupid-across-almost-all-possible-worlds ideas and convince people just not to do them rather than having to advocate for an explicit good-idea alternative.)