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realitygrill comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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I am not at all like you. I don't have much interest in policy at all, and I do tend to refuse to hold a position, being very mindful of how easy it is to be completely off course (Probably from reading too much history of science. It's "the graveyard of dead ideas", after all.). I'm likely to tell the Cabinet Ministers to get off my back or they'll have absolutely useless recommendations.
However, I think you have hit upon the point that makes Bayesianism attractive to me: it's rationality you can use to act in real-time, under uncertainty, in normal life. Traditional Rationality is slow.
I see your point, the trouble is that a recommendation that comes too late often is absolutely useless. A lot of policy is time-dependant, if you don't act within a certain time frame then you might a swell do nothing. While sometimes doing nothing is the right thing to do, a late recommendation is often no better than no recommendation.
Yeah, I forgot to add that you've budged me slightly from my staunch positivist attitude for social science. Thanks. Reading up on complex adaptive systems has made me just that much more skeptical about our ability to predict policy's effects, and perhaps biased me.
It's nice to know I've had an influence :)
As it happens, I'm pretty sceptical as to how much we can know as well. There's nothing like doing policy to gain an understanding of how messy it can be. While the social sciences have a less than wonderful record in developing knowledge (look at the record of development economics, as one example), and economic forecasting is still not much better than voodoo but it's not like there's another group out there with all the answers. We don't have all of the answers, or even most of them, but we're better than nothing, which is the only alternative.
Nothing is often a pretty good alternative. Government action always comes at a cost, even if only the deadweight loss of taxation (keyphrase "public choice" for reasons you might expect the cost to be higher than that). I'm not trying to turn this into a political debate, but you should consider doing nothing not necessarily a bad thing, and what you do not necessarily better.
When I said "better than nothing" I was referring to advice, not the actual actions taken. My background is in economics so I'm quite familiar with both dead-weight loss of taxation and public choice theory, though these days I lean more toward Bryan Caplan's rational irrationality theory of government failure.
I agree that nothing is often a good thing for governments to do, and in many cases that is the advice that Cabinet receives.
Politicians' logic: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”