I don't think your parable of the mechanics without tools makes for a very good analogy with the problems of politics. In your story, it seems clear that if a mechanic came along who had the skills and equipment to actually fix cars, he would rapidly achieve success and drive the ineffective mechanics out of business. The problem of politics is that the nature of the system is such that it does not reward competent policy making but rather rewards competent politicking. The two seem to be only very loosely correlated.
If the desired outcome is good policy then the problem is not how to create greater policy making competence in politicians, or even to educate the public in how to recognize greater policy making competence in politicians, but to restructure the system so that competent policy making is rewarded. The fact that such a political structure is rarely if ever observed in reality suggests to me that good policy is not actually the true desired outcome of political systems.
I doubt understanding differential equations would help Congressfolk make better decisions. It is the economic concepts that would be useful for them, not so much the math.
Also, our basic ideology of democracy says that ordinary people can make wise decisions about policy without expert knowledge. So it is hard for voters to say politicians are unqualified without such knowledge without admitting that voters are also unqualified.
What America needs most is awareness of how much of a difference rationality and intelligence can make.
Agreed, I think. This might even be what LW needs most. Any chance you (or anyone) could write us a good overview of how much of a difference it can make, and what detailed, concrete, empirical evidence backs the claim? Preferably as a top-level post? Seems to me we still haven't had a full answer to the points Yvain raised in "Extreme rationality: It's not that great". Eliezer has given us good techniques and good analysis of why we'd ...
the most effective way of proselytizing rationality would be for rationalists to work on their neglected social signaling skills. No one will be convinced of anything you say if your body language doesn't scream "alpha who is going places".
I don't know about the Congresscritters, but there are a bunch of very smart, educated, informed people in Washington who have a lot of say over how the government spends its money. Whatever their flaws, people like Henry Paulson, Tim Geithner, and Larry Summers are not lacking the basic tools of economic analysis, and they have had more influence over the shape of our current recovery effort than almost(?) anyone in Congress. And there are also the bureaucrats - the people at the CBO who analyzed the stimulus package, and the staff at the various govern...
It's interesting that China's leadership is full of engineers and economists; as a whole they're probably far more qualified to do their jobs than the leadership of most Western countries. I think there's some truth to the idea that you can have qualified leaders or you can have elected leaders but you can't have both. Getting elected just doesn't translate into being the best candidate for the job. If positions in the private sector were filled by popular vote, industry would grind to a halt. I think if you honestly consider that as a though experiment, it's obvious that only a truly absurd and impractical amount of voter rationality would solve the inherent problem, which is just that it isn't a sensible way to fill vacancies.
And what America needs second-most is for people to recognize the toolkits of >rationality and appreciate their power.
I think one related problem is that people view the goal of becoming educated and intelligent in roughly the same way as they view the goal of becoming good at sports. In typical tournament-style contests, it's the winners who reap most of the benefits. There's no benefit to becoming a good tennis player in absolute terms; there's only a benefit to becoming one of the best tennis players. If you're one of the worst tennis players, you...
Downvoted.
As a gut feeling, I agree with the sentiment. But... Most if not all of us agree that neither politicians nor voters are as educated or as rational as they should be, and we voice our agreements frequently. Is this the best use of our time? Considering that many folks have called for "thinking-based" education for a long time now, we're not even innovating. So, what are we doing? Reinforcing virtually uncontroversial beliefs? Priming our own private affective death spiral?
One problem is that representatives aren't specialized. Nobody would run a business where 435 people who all had the same title and job description got together to decide how to run things. It isn't quite like that; there is hierarchy in Congress. But everybody has "legislator" as their job description. This requires them to be experts in the law. Really, they should have some legal experts to help them figure out where things should go in the legal code, and how they should be written; and a bunch of other experts to argue over what should ...
Paraphrase:
"Any free citizen needs to have a basic understanding of Math, Science, and History; without those they can't be a free citizen."
Robert A. Heinlein
*He may have said Economics, not Science.
I sometimes tell people how I believe that governments should not be documents, but semi-autonomous computer programs. I have a story that I'm not going to tell now, about incorporating inequalities into laws, then incorporating functions into them, then feedback loops, then statistical measures, then learning mechanisms, on up to the point where voters and/or legislatures set only the values that control the system, and the system produces the low-level laws and policy decisions (in a way that balances exploration and exploitation).
Sounds like a reasonable description of how a free market works to me.
The primary focus of schools should be to prepare students to participate in democracy. If that policy were followed consistently, much of what is already taught in schools wouldn't have to change, but there are some parts of the emphasis it would change dramatically.
Say you're taking your car to an auto mechanic for repairs. You've been told he's the best mechanic in town. The mechanic rolls up the steel garage door before driving the car into the garage, and you look inside and notice something funny. There are no tools. The garage is bare - just an empty concrete space with four bay doors and three other cars.
You point this out to the mechanic. He shrugs it off, saying, "This is how I've always worked. I'm just that good. You were lucky I had an opening; I'm usually booked." And you believe him, having seen the parking lot full of cars waiting to be repaired.
You take your car to another mechanic in the same town. He, too, has no tools in his garage. You visit all the mechanics in town, and find a few that have some wrenches, and others with a jack or an air compressor, but no one with a full set of tools.
You notice the streets are nearly empty besides your car. Most of the cars in town seem to be in for repairs. You talk to the townsfolk, and they tell you how they take their cars from one shop to another, hoping to someday find the mechanic who is brilliant and gifted enough to fix their car.
I sometimes tell people how I believe that governments should not be documents, but semi-autonomous computer programs. I have a story that I'm not going to tell now, about incorporating inequalities into laws, then incorporating functions into them, then feedback loops, then statistical measures, then learning mechanisms, on up to the point where voters and/or legislatures set only the values that control the system, and the system produces the low-level laws and policy decisions (in a way that balances exploration and exploitation). (Robin's futarchy in which you "vote on values, bet on beliefs" describes a similar, though less-automated system of government.)
And one reaction - actually, one of the most intelligent reactions - is, "But then... legislators would have to understand something about math." As if that were a bug, and not a feature.
We have 535 Congressmen in the United States. Over the past half a year, they've decided how to spend several trillion of our dollars on interventions to vitalize our economy. But after listening to them for 20 years, I have the feeling that few of them could explain the concepts of opportunity cost, diminishing returns, or the law of supply and demand. You could probably count on one hand the number who could solve an ordinary differential equation.
This isn't the fault of the congressmen. This is the fault of the voters. Why do we regularly elect representatives who are mechanics without wrenches?
We like to praise the man who achieves great things through vision, genius, and force of personality. If you tell people that he had great tools, people think you're trying to diminish his accomplishments. People love Einstein above all scientists because they have the idea that he just sat in a chair and conducted thought-experiments. They like to believe that he did poorly in math at school (he didn't). Maybe this is because they feel math is a crutch that a true genius wouldn't need. Maybe it's because they would like to think that they could also come up with general relativity if they just had enough time alone. They love scientists who say they work by visualization or intuition, and who talk about seeing the solution to a problem in a dream. It's not evident that Einstein was smarter than John von Neumann or Alan Turing, yet most Americans have never heard their names.
I think that what America needs most, in terms of rationality, is not training in rationalist techniques - although that's of value. What America needs most is awareness of how much of a difference intelligence and education and rationality can make. And what America needs second-most is for people to recognize the toolkits of rationality and appreciate their power.
Most people don't realize that there are small bodies of knowledge that radically amplify your intelligence. Even a general understanding of evolution, or thermodynamics, or information theory, gives you a grasp on all sorts of other topics that would have otherwise remained mysterious. Understanding how to rephrase a real-world problem as a function maximization problem lets you think quantitatively about something that before you would have had to address with gut feelings.
One reason for this may be that, in the mind of the public, the prototypical smart person is a physicist. And particle physics, quantum mechanics, and relativity just aren't very useful toolkits. People hardly ever get an insight into anything in their ordinary lives from quantum mechanics or relativity (and when they do, they're wrong). You don't have to know that stuff. And, as 20th-century physics is thought of as the pinnacle of science, it taints all the other sciences with its own narrowness of applicability.
With the exception of math, I can't recall any teacher ever trying to show me that something we were studying was a toolkit applicable beyond the subject being studied. The way we try to teach our students to think is like the (failed) way we tried to teach AIs to think in the 1970s (and, in Austin, through the present day) - by giving them a lot of specialized knowledge about a lot of different subjects. This is a time-tested way to spend a lot of time and money without instilling much intelligence into either a computer or a student. A better approach would be to look for abstractions that can be applied to as many domains as possible, and to have one class for each of these abstractions.
(PS - When I speak specifically about America, it's not because I think the rest of the world is unimportant. I just don't know as much about the rest of the world.)