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James_K comments on What are our domains of expertise? A marketplace of insights and issues - Less Wrong
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Comments (63)
I'm an occasional commenter, not a lurker, but I tend to stay on the fringes of conversations.
I'm an economist and policy analyst working for the New Zealand government. So I have expertise in the operation of (one specific) government, economics and the policy development process.
In policy work, bad thinking can cost millions or even billions of dollars, and destroy lives. The more important something is, the more important rationality becomes when thinking about that thing.
I had been toying with the idea of writing an article discussing how to think about evidence in policy (an environment where evidence is often rare and low quality) and why I think Bayesian Rationality is much more useful than Traditional Rationality in an evidence-poor environment.
I don't really know, I read Less Wrong for entertainment as much as edification.
It seems to me that we have a surprisingly large community in NZ and AU. Do you have any ideas as to why that might be?
Also, I have long been interested in understanding the differences in social epistemology between what seem like unusually well governed developed nations like NZ and other developed nations. I'd really like to hear from you regarding such issues. You can reach me at michael.vassar@gmail.com
I've noticed there are a reasonable number of Kiwis and Aussies on the Internet generally, at least relative to our population, since our representative numbers would be 0.4% of the Internet population. Of course a lot of the difference there will be due to the fact that we're an English-speaking country with common cultural roots the the US.
I'm not sure why you'd get a large number of Kiwis and Aussies here specifically though. We're more secular than the US or UK (especially in New Zealand) and since I imagine there is a negative correlation between religiosity and the topics Less Wrong covers, that might be part of the reason. I also get the impression that we're less deferential to authority than the rest of the Anglosphere, and I would also expect interest in Less Wrong to be positively correlated with contrarianism, at least along some axes of contrarianism.
I'll send you an e-mail to talk about the other stuff.
I've heard from people who know academic philosophy that the trends in Australia and New Zealand are very different from the rest of the world.
The funny thing is, one night my (American) friends and I had an informal discussion about what country in the world was least likely to become a dictatorship. We decided it had to be New Zealand or maybe Australia. I'm not sure that we knew enough to be good judges, but it somehow made sense.
I had a similar opinion before meeting an Australian politician and getting a tour of the Queensland parliament.
I, for one, would be quite interested in reading about how you would apply rationality to public policy.
I may put together an outline for the next Open Thread / Discussion forum thing. Though, its worth pointing out that I'm talking about apply rationality to the process of developing policy options. Which policies get implemented is a matter of politics, which as Robin Hanson points out, is not about policy.