Politics

• To debate politics as in any other field, first gather information and then decide. Think like a scientist.
• Think of it as a complex system. Everything is related and has unexpected consequences. Don't miss-attribute systemic failures to scapegoats.
  • The world is really complex, so we can't effectively model it. Therefore we should not just use the simple model where there is only one approach to solving problems.
  • If everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? Probably Incentives.
  • It's easier to blame people than systems.
• Politics is affected by the population psyche. During rough times, we lose some ability to think clearly as a group.
• If you think politics is annoying, it's because you're privileged enough to not care about it.
• Don't attach to any movement so it doesn't become part of your identity. Arguments are soldiers. Once you attach to one side, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side.
• Political ideologies are mostly wrong. For most issues it's makes a lot more sense to study the issue in detail than try to have an opinion based on pre-packaged ideology. It's better to discuss issues without invoking teams.
  • Issues aren't binary. Political parties make it seem so to make it work with their political interests. When you spot a binary question, think if its really a binary one or it is much more nuanced.
• Some issues are not as important but are discussed much more times. The fact that some changes happens very gradually makes it hard for our brains that didn't evolve with subtle dangers in mind to realize the scope of the problem (e.g Climate Change vs terrorist attacks). Sometimes, even if the issue is very simple to solve, its hard to discern its importance when every other issue is being raised as more important than the others.
• Not all actions are equal. Some actions just validate your identify (arguing with someone online) and others don't seem right but make large differences (negotiating farm animals welfare).
• We usually vote to whoever gives us simple (and probably wrong) solutions.
• Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others — Winston Churchill probably quoting someone else. To reach more people, arguments and topics need to be simplified to the maximum, losing trade-offs and nuance.
  • Some other criticisms are; average voters are not sophisticated, because each voter only has a small chance of affecting the outcome, few voters put high-quality thought into their decisions, and you often get either low participation (making the system easy to attack) or de-facto centralization because everyone just defaults to trusting and copying the views of some influencer.
• Democracy is not there to create optimal outcomes, it's there to prevent really really bad outcomes.
• Any social structure decays over time, including political systems, nonprofits, religions, … This is a social problem, that needs social solutions.
• Groups that form around a goal can work better or worse, depending on how well the goal can be verified by the group. If you're forming a group based on what percentage of your income are you willing to devote to altruism, that's a really easy thing to monitor.
• Meritocracy isn't an "-ocracy" like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.
• There's an imbalance between doing things and preventing things. If a leader does something, and it's bad, then journalists will be on the scene to interview the victims of their failure, protesters can march against their abuses of power, etc. If a leader doesn't do something, and it would have been good, this is invisible except in rare cases. As the media becomes better at covering things, people become more outraged by abuses, we should expect the number of new policies that have large impact to go down.
  • When you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more.
• Processes that create durable change need to be bulldozery toward the status quo but protecting that change requires a vetocracy. There's some optimal rate at which such processes should happen; too much and there's chaos, not enough and there's stagnation.
• Your perception of reality has probably been at least a little manipulated. Your opponents are behaving the way they are based on a perception of reality that's different from your own.
  • What does this look/feel like to the people I don't know?
• Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking. Tribes reduce the ability to challenge ideas or diversify your views because no one wants to lose support of the tribe. Tribes are as self-interested as people, encouraging ideas and narratives that promote their survival. But they're exponentially more influential than any single person. So tribes are very effective at promoting views that aren't analytical or rational, and people loyal to their tribes are very poor at realizing it.
• Utopia can't be planed from scratch! Push decisions to the edges (localism) where they have incentives to make good choices.
  • A good counter argument is that people might not be educated enough to make the best decision and a centralized institution could do it much better for them (e.g: a government banning lead from most products is credited with the most significant global drop in crime rates in decades).
• Most political debates are people with different time horizons talking over each other.
• Liberalism has a few big economic problems; coordination issues (Moloch), irrationality and lack of information.
  • You are not an individual self in the first place, you're an ecosystem of parts. It's teamwork all the way down!
• The costs of regulations are regressive: much more easily absorbed by big companies than startups. The problem with banning and regulating things is that it's a blunt instrument.
• Could laws be self corrected? When a law is approved, If X is not archived in Y time, withdraw law. Many of the problems people worry about probably won't exist in 10 years. There are likely new problems you could never have guessed would come up. When writing a policy, include a few internal facing failure signals and a few external facing failure signals that make clear the policy isn't working anymore and might be better to revisit.
• Sometimes the more important thing is not better mechanisms for the final decision-making step, but better mechanisms for discussing and coordinating what to propose (explore the space) in the first place.
• We should be exploring alternatives ways of doing things. Right now we have mostly one type of political system, one type of voting system and one method of science funding for example.
• Communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves. Censorship and moderation might be required for a great community to continue existing.
• Being good at politics doesn't mean being good at taking decisions that help your voters. High-functioning sociopaths climb the ladder, so now the world's run mostly by sociopaths.
• Most of the time, political parties focus on how to collect more money (updating taxes) instead of how to use it more effectively.
  • We don't know a lot about how the money is used and how to best optimize it. There's isn't too much attention around transparency of these movements.
• Transparency in politics make it easier to understand the issues and the people who are making progress. E.g: There is no transparency around recycling, so its hard to measure any impact (positive or negative).
• Absolute laws affect problems that are context dependent. The goal is to minimize misery.
• Everyone has a strong pressure toward believing a political story where the agents of positive change are things and people that they can personally relate to. E.g: a lawyer might think that the best way to solve a problem is to sue someone, a programmer might think that the best way to solve a problem is to make open source software for it.
• Governments usually don't have a great view into the data. They can't look at the city's economy, energy, climate, and infrastructure in one glance. If they could, even if poor governing decisions were made, it would be easier to see the impact and optimize them.
• Central planning and interventionism should be evaluated by counting "knobs" (adjustable parameters) rather than measuring absolute magnitude of intervention.
  • Simple systems with fewer knobs are desirable because they:
    • Have fewer points of failure.
    • Are less likely to overfit to specific contexts.
    • Are more resistant to corruption and special interests.
    • Can more easily achieve legitimacy through comprehensibility.
  • There's a difference between redundant complexity (many parts serving similar goals) and optimizing complexity (one knob per problem).
  • What seems "simple" is often just familiar - cultural context and shared historical experience shape our perception of complexity.
  • System design should balance mathematical/technical approaches with historical/anthropological learning to avoid extreme conservatism or dangerous utopianism.

Voting Theory

• No silver bullet.
• Politics In The Animal Kingdom is a great summary of a few methods.
• There are better ways to build a ballot.
• Approval voting is usually a good choice. Is simple to explain and to count, and comprehensibility is an important factor when choosing a voting method. That said, there are really good alternatives.
• Voting isn't really a way to get rid of conflict - it just pushes it underground. Spend the time Talking about it.
• Pairwise comparison methods can help find consensus by comparing options two at a time. This reduces cognitive load and can reveal subtle preferences that might be missed in traditional voting. Because each comparison is "local", you never have to answer difficult grand questions like "what are my top 5 projects". Instead, you answer much more concrete questions like "which of these two projects is more important to me?".
• Voting is a zero-sum game, meaning that whomever wins does so at the expense of someone else. As a result, voting promotes competition, not cooperation. This issue can be mitigated when:
  • The default mode is failure, people are motivated to figure out how to escape their terrible fate. If one person loses, everybody loses.
  • There are clear actions, timelines, and consequences. By specifying the outcome beforehand, and making it undesirable, there is no choice but to take action or lose the game.

Interesting Ideas

• Charter Cities.
• Quadratic Voting and Quadratic Funding.
• Georgism.
• Prediction Markets as a tool for accountability. FAQ.
• Pol.is.
• Community Notes