= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
The Sciencearchist Manifesto
This is a meta-political pamphlet I plan on handing out in every political circle I can find. I am posting it here as a discussion topic because it seems to have some relevance to rationality beyond that which political texts always have by virtue of being political; and secondly, the best feedback positive and negative that I've ever received on my writing have been from LWers. So, please, give me all the feedback you can, positive or negative, but try to keep it primarily non-political. Tell me if my arguments, or clarity of thought and thesis suck. Thanks ahead of time.
Over 2000 years ago, the Greek philosopher, Plato, asked a simple question about the nature of democracy in Athens. We should ask an analogous question in the third millennium, accounting for the original question's inevitable anachronisms: "If your daughter's leg is broken, should you go to the market place and hold a vote to decide how to treat her; if your dog is sick, should you go to a park and ask everyone what they think is wrong with him/her to find a diagnosis; if you are experiencing serious psychological troubles, should you ask your neighbors for advice; if the answers to all of these questions is 'no, I should consult a successful expert with training', then why is it that we seem to think that political problems should be treated differently?" The thesis of sciencearchy is that there is no good reason to treat political matters differently; ultimately, we should give complete political power to the experts.
The question, of course, arises as to how it is that we should decide who the experts are. But this question is easily dealt with; we are actually very good, most of the time, at deciding who experts are. How do we decide who the experts are in physics, biology, psychology, engineering, medicine, etc.? We let the scrutiny of experimentation decide. Those whom most accurately and reliably predict results with their model, are those which best understand the target of inquiry. But politics is not a purely descriptive field, it is also in many ways a field of what ought to be. It is in a sense a field of engineering. But the scientific method can select amongst engineers as well as it can amongst theorists; progress in an engineering field is progress in a scientific field, and vice-versa. The experts are those with the highest scientific competence.
This is not to suggest that we should simply give the best political scientist or economist in the world complete political control; no problem in science has ever been solved by the efforts of one person, independent of his/her colleagues, both past and present. We should let those with the best predictive theories decide what we should do as a giant network of peers competing and cooperating to solve the world's political problems; as mass networks of scientists work now on some of the most difficult and abstract problems the universe has to offer (with notable success mind you). And they should use precisely those methods used by every other engineering science to do so, the method of science. In this sense, under sciencearchy, there is no one who is ruler, not even the rule of some council, there is only the personality-less rule of science.
To ensure that council men/women don't simply institute those laws which profit them, we should pay them based solely on the amount of money they are willing to bet that their policy will work, i.e., we would institute a betting market (much like in Futarchy). A proposal becomes law if, and only if, the betting market has significantly more bets in its favor than against. We then pay those who accurately predicted the results, i.e., bet on the actual outcome of the policy. Council men may also bet on what the result of removing a policy would be. A policy is removed if, and only if, there are significantly more bets that removing it will increase our happiness, than there are against. Our only precaution as sciencearchists is that the details of the methods used for placing bets, which are most successful, be open knowledge for the rest of the council, as well, as the details of the methods that reliably fail. That sort of openness is critical to the success of science; scientists must be able to learn from the mistakes of other scientists as well as their successes.
A key question is "how is this council of political scientists to determine whether some policy of theirs was a success; how do they know if they have to try again?" If their plan has not either spread happiness, increased the net happiness of our species, or avoided suffering, then it was wasteful; if it decreased either the spread of happiness or the net happiness of the species it was a failure, and if it increased either without decreasing the other, increased both, or avoided suffering, it was a success. To determine which of these cases resulted from the institution of a given policy, we should use the best empirical methods available. We, however, cannot determine how happy people are feeling, simply by asking them (unlike in Futarchy). Let's not forget that psychology has taught us to be skeptical of reported pleasures and desires. These guidelines are rough, and there are still many details to be worked out, but that the final answer will look something very much like the above we can be confident in.
One of the primary problems people seem to have with these commonsense arguments is that they are directly apposed to the concept of democracy. Why this is, I have no idea. Democracy seems absolutely insane when dealing with any other serious problem in life, whether it be stopping a meteor from hitting the earth, or figuring out what matter is made out of. Why this isn't just as obvious to us in the case of politics remains a dark mystery for me. Of course, using a blood line, or military/strategic competence, or any other factor besides scientific competence to select political experts, is just as silly as the use of voting. But ultimately they are all as far as can be from the way that science selects its experts. If by "being for democracy" one means that it is the duty of the people to force progress on society, then there is nothing in sciencearchy which is incompatible with that view; however, if by "being for democracy" one means that the most progressive thing that we could do as a species is elect our leaders and policies by holding mass popularity contests, then certainly this view is directly apposed to sciencearchy.
I, Ronny Fernandez, the author of the above, am no political scientist and no economist. I would never participate in betting on, or proposing new policies in the system described above, for I know I don't have the competence, or training. We must remember that sciencearchy is not a political position, it is a meta-poltical position; we are not proposing policies, we are proposing a method for how to propose and select policies. A sciencearchist must either be a political-scientist, an economist (a degree is neither needed, nor enough for either title, mind you), or mostly and openly undecided about policy due to ignorance. So, though I am no political expert, I am a philosopher of science; and I have had enough contact with the history and conquering of extremely difficult scientific problems, to know that there is only one way to solve them — by doing extremely good science (not all right, or good enough science: really good science). And make no mistake about it, political problems are extremely difficult scientific problems. The methods humanity has used to select its political leaders and solutions, have all been as wildly unscientific as using a dousing rod to find water. Sciencearchist seek to bring the structure of political decision making, out of the bronze age, and into the millennium of science.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (64)
I have an inchoate thought I hope someone can seize and articulate.
There is nothing wrong with political posts as such, they are just correlated with flawed thinking, particularly not-even-wrong statements and the conjunction fallacy.
I see people object to political posts and I typically think: the way they phrased that objection seems wrong to me. I can see specific problems with the thought pattern in the post, and I can see how the political nature of the subject matter may have obscured them from the speaker, but I can't see a single influence directly from political to inappropriate that doesn't pass through intermediate nodes that are flaws in their own right.
Don't worry, every source is a fine primary source, even if it is a poor secondary source.
These words are a sign that you are about to try and patch a wish.
Advantages of democracy: a) people feel they can achieve their goals through peaceful persuasion, so there are fewer and less violent revolutions b) smooth transition between regimes
Not advantages of democracy: a) dealing with serious problems in life
Saying "the killing curse" does not kill. To kill, one must say "Avada Kedavra". You cannot select for scientific competence, only "scientific competence", those who succeed according to whatever normalizing proxy there is (almost certainly one involving status and human judgement, rather than just the flaws of being able to game a mechanical system).
Those who are experts at are not experts on, and I fear for the rationality of those who trust p-values.
"Don't post political posts on LW" is an ethical injunction, which is to say: a political post is likely to have problems, I can confidently predict this without seeing the post or knowing what those problems are; furthermore, if upon reading to post I don't see any problems with it, a much more likely explanation is that this is because I'm missing them due to agreeing with it than because there are no problems with the post. Thus having a blanket "no politics" rule is better then attempting to disqualify political posts by pointing to the specific problems they have, which will only drag us further into mind-killing territory.
Very good.
But I'd say that posts with exactly one problem are fine for LW and correctable. The problems arise when politics causes someone to make at least five or so errors in a few sentences, and then the idea is so confounded that it is hard to tell which three errors attributed to him constitutes a charitable reading or best reconstruction of something resembling the original idea.
One should be possible to tell when one's political opponents are making only one error - if one can find such a case to begin with.
If I were writing something like this for LW, I would include something like:
also, you said:
I don't understand, but I'm intrigued.
P( People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion. I Democracy ) may be greater than P(People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion.), and maybe greater than 50%, but that doesn't mean P(Democracy | People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion.) isn't less than 0.001. Democracy is a sufficient cause, not a necessary cause, for the advantages you listed, which I agree are by and large representative. In fact, I predict with something around 75% hit or miss 10%, that impressively Bayesian scientists could achieve both, settling disputes by peaceful and rational means, and transitioning policies in the optimal way, better than any publicly elected group of officials, or policies.
A congress man that votes for one thousand policies that save millions of lives and generate billions for the GDP and suggests one hundred of them him/herself, would make just as much money on average as a congress man who votes for one thousand policies that kill millions of people and creates billions in national debt. The wage of a congress man is significantly close to, if not completely independent of their betting, i.e., voting, record. The scoring system does not reward calibration or discrimination; it encourages charisma beyond all else, and also to some degree publicly perceived merit (though it probably plays a smaller role than you would think, specially if you heard reported reasons for subjects' voting decisions). And publicly perceived merit is probably even more independent of log(P(what happened)) for a given official, than wage.
This is the silliness Sciencearchy seeks to correct. To the point of using the actual Log(P(what happened)) to score bets if need be. Establishing tests for success and failure of a given specific policy isn't that hard (try it), but finding a genral method by which to establish the test given any policy is much harder. But if it;s easy in the specific case there must be some general rule we are applying. As an example: to see if socializing health care worked, do some sampling to find the average quality and quantity of treatment, before socialization, and after. If it increased, pay those who bet on in favor, if it decreases or stays the same, pay those who bet against. Only institute a policy if those with "scientific competence" greater than some thresh hold, are betting disproportionately in favor, or against. This would ensure that anyone can bet; anyone with the right skills can gain political power; and only those with the right skills can gain political power. They will not be given any sort of wage besides that which they win, or secondary income. And, of course, it would be completely illegal for third party interest groups to bribe top score players. Any donation given to betters in favor, must be given proportionately to betters against as well, otherwise it is bribery. You may invest in successful gamblers, but if their Log(P(what happened)) shoots down out of no where right after a private investment, they'll be investigated, and will loose their power by virtue of the scoring system threshold. Mind you, this does not establish some goal for the entirety of the council of top gamblers to reach, they can always increase their expected payoff.
My prediction is that as the top record gamblers' log(P(what happened))s get higher, as they do in every other game, the methods they use to achieve this, will look more and more like the scientific method, i.e., selecting from empirically testable hypotheses (predictions about policies' results in this case) with the aid of mathematical rigor (decision theory, and probability most likely).
It seems to me that I establish this suggestion in my post decently, but no one seems to have commented on it positive or negative. Did I leave it out; not make it memorable enough; overcrowd with two many concepts? I'd like to know what you cats think.
It's hard to write the above in a way I feel comfortable passing out to people who aren't LWers. The OP was my first last first draft attempt. One day I'll get around to giving my formal reasons for promoting sciencearchy (if the name sucks I'll change it, i'm just used to it), but for now I think I can give an intuitivish formulation of my position, without the use of log(P(whathappened)) and a general Bayesian background.
I majored in history, and I wouldn't be surprised if my approach of emphasizing stability rather than problem solving was common among people with similar educations. Rather than have government solve problems, I am concerned with having government not collapse into anarchy or civil war and wait for people to invent useful things so human progress goes steadily upward. I can see why political scientists would want their field to be about more than not failing, since there is so much potential for government to do good, and good governments are so much better than average or poor ones. Even a mid-sized nation has not just more resources than a bunch of major charities combined, but other legal advantages and advantages of sovereignty as well.
Basically, if you are wrong about what is rational, all can learn from any mistake and use the essay and thinking behind it, rather than political systems, as the basis of a rationality discussion.
I carefully said people "felt" persuasion would work that mattered directly. If people really can achieve their goals peacefully but think they can't, they will not be peaceful. If people really cannot but think they can, they will be peaceful. And peace is good.
That's one word, congressman, which is important because female Representatives vary on whether they prefer to be called congressman, congresswoman or congressperson. Males prefer congressman or congressperson.
I don't think it's that simple. I think the US has poor average health outcomes per dollar spent because of diminishing returns and wealth disparities. In other words, if another country spends $10,000 on two people with a disease, and the US has one individual buy $30,000 worth of care and another $2,000, the US may have worse average care per dollar simply because treating the second American left low-hanging fruit and it was hard to productively spend the last $20,000 on the first person, even if all marginal dollars were spent as well as possible. There are also questions of which system best incentivises new discoveries: recall that the recent malaria vaccine was thought to quite possibly work before the recent study was conducted but was not mass produced and distributed because it was (correctly) thought worthwhile to make sure in such cases with double blind experiments in the field. This was an example of sacrificing lives for research efficiency/money/the unit of caring.
Is that the same as proposing solutions early?
Possibly. I was thinking more of something like not enough time spent on suggestion relative to others. But I wouldn't doubt it. I expected this Post to be bad (though admittedly not such a huge fail). Most of the time when I suck at thinking, and I notice it, it's got something to do with proposing solutions too early.
Probably isn't. But it is simple enough to be a practically approachable statistical problem.
Lol, I suck. I'll leave it the same as personal punishment.
Gotcha
"Can't x", and "Will x" or "Did x", are contradictory. But I hear what you are saying, I think. Attitude is an extremely important factor, if not the most important factor, in how brutally people handle their political differences.
But if people who were not politicians, could feel as confident about their work, as they do about the work of their doctors and nurses, then I don't think we would have to worry nearly as much about how we are going to settle our political disagreements. The experts are on it. They'll figure out the best way for us all to get what we want available. But then again a doctor will rarely if ever benefit from not giving you proper treatment; politicians benefit from not instituting the best policy constantly with a diverse range of creative cons.
Of course, public opinion certainly does affect what policies are likely to succeed, and to find public opinion you need randomized polls (much like democracy except not self selecting), but you need more than that too. Information independent of public opinion. However, if you can convince your neighbors to write down "socialist" in next year's census, successful gamblers will notice this and exploit it for all it is worth.
It seems intuitive to me (and I realize that isn't much) that a society where we use a betting market to dictate policy, would be very conducive to rational political debate, in both elite and hobbyist gamblers. Peace is good; and obviously, political scientists would produce more peace than democratically elected officials. But so would almost any other group that was rewarded for increasing happiness. Not war means more peace. More peace means more happy. More happy means more reward.
For improving to a Pareto optimum yes, but probably not for choosing among them.
It's lesswrong; will you ever find a higher density of Bayesians? We know P-values don't account for P(H|~E), P(H|E), P(E) or P(H). P(E|H) is not enough information to determine your proper probability assignment to H, given you see E, and P(E|H) is all a P-value tells you.
There are so many nits I want to pick that it's creating a stack overflow in my brain. Here's some:
This is a terrible label. It gives off a strong whiff of scientism, but that's not really what your manifesto is about.
What did he ask? You never say.
I seriously doubt most people know what Futarchy is. It would help to explain the term before you use it.
One of the reasons that science is mostly apolitical is because scientists don't make policy decisions. If you put them in power, this will quickly change. Also, 'personality' is misspelled.
False analogy. Except for extreme direct democracies, the populace doesn't vote on specific policies--politicians make these decisions.
The use of the term "meta-political" makes no sense. Democracy and authoritarianism also do these things, but they are referred to as political positions, not meta-political ones.
Overall, it seems like a bad idea. Organized science has optimized scientists for being good at working within the academic system, not for making coming up with policy suggestions. In fact, current political figures are probably much better at doing politics than even the most eminent scientists of today. I'd much prefer vanilla Futarchy to this.
ETA: I agree with beoShaffer--I don't like this kind of political post.
Re: Sciencearchy is a terrible label:
Why not Technocracy?
Wikipedia says:
Not bad, is missing the betting market, but sounds about right.
You may also want to look into the history of technocracy, so you can see how it worked where is was actually attempted. (HINT: not very well.)
sciencocracy then maybe
Some states have provisions for referendums that are variously hard to meet and cover different subjects. So there are many dimensions here, not just a spectrum from from more to less extreme democracy.
You're right, good point. I had representative democracy in mind and wasn't thinking of referendums.
All usual compounds with -archy as a second part have a Greek first part. Sciencearchy looks not good. Also, there is already an established name: meritocracy.
When the topic isn't politicised. Look at an average debate about whether WTC buildings could have fallen due to fire alone and whom to trust in that question. You will not find much agreement.
You acknowledge the problem, yet you don't address it.
Vague. Once an unambiguous decision is to be made, we need unambiguous rules how to obtain it. We can let history decide which theory of gravity is the correct one if there is controversy, but when it comes to the next year's budget, we need decision right now.
By what measure? Whether a policy works is rarely a binary question.
What if there are more mutually incompatible proposals that all have more bets in their favour? There may be incompatible policies which still are all likely to work, by whatever standard of "working".
This is not my primary problem. Besides, "opposed" is misspelled.
Doesn't sound right. If you don't satisfy whatever membership criteria for political scientist or economist group, you are supposed to behave like having exactly zero knowledge? Not even small bets? No place for expressing preferences either?
Given this attitude and the fact that you are neither a political scientist nor an economist, what motivates you to endorse sciencearchy? Shouldn't you be consistent with your suggestions and behave like being effectively ignorant about its value, thus being silent about it? I know that you maintain that sciencearchy is a meta-political rather than political stance, but still, either it works or it doesn't and it needs knowledge of politics and economy to tell which is the case.
Good post. I disagree with one point:
Conservation of expected evidence: were he a political scientist or economist, one would rightfully accuse him of possibly having selfish motives or biases making him overestimate the value of this proposal. A person saying others are more fit to rule more likely has generally better motives, such as wanting to live under good government.
I am only saying that
is a self-refuting set of statements. This is so whether or not substituting 3 by its negation would lead to accusations of bias. There is no reason to assume that having said 1 and 2 one must be immune to any criticism at least for one possible version of 3. This is not analogical to the linked witchcraft example, where additional questions were presented as evidence for or against guilt while all possible answers moved the probability of guilt up. Here I don't necessarily expect the author's membership in scientist group to be evidence for validity of his suggestions.
I say that because I am a philosopher of science. It's a meta-political claim not a political claim.
I endorse the distinction between policies and meta policies, which I think is the only place I disagree with prase.
However, this is an extremely awkward way to say that. Specifically, I don't understand the first sentence.
You're a philosopher of science?
Yeah, I was thrown off by that too. I always thought he was a potato.
Only political scientist can have strong opinions about what policies are good. But political expertise is not needed for meta-policies. Expertise in successful group problem solving is what is required to propose meta-policies. That's what I'm claiming.
The rationale behind the claim that only political scientists can have strong opinions about policies was that only they have sufficient knowledge to predict how well the policies are going to work, right? They know it because they studied history of politics and sociology and all other relevant disciplines and can predict how human society will react to attempted implementation of a given policy. The distinction between policies and meta-policies, however potentially useful elsewhere, is irrelevant in this respect. Whether democracy or oligarchy or monarchy or meritocracy are working model of government is a perfectly empirical question whose answer must take into account historical experiences, psychological and sociological facts, game theory and perhaps other related questions. I don't see single reason to think that a philosopher of science is better equipped to this task than a political scientist. Politics is emphatically not group problem solving, it's rather balancing power and interests of different groups, if a brief quasi-definition is needed.
Certainly. It is an empirical question; one that you would want a history/political science major as a colleague in, but not to run entirely. As you mention, we would require game theorists and psychologists and the like to find the answer. But the successes of betting markets and the scientific method in such a diverse array of disciplines, provides at least some intuition that they might be a good place to start.
I agree to this as well as vice-versa. Political scientists don't need to have a working knowledge about biases and heuristics by virtue of their being political scientists. Philosophers of science, or perhaps better, philosophers of rationality, do. I think this is a problem that requires much more than political scientists are trained to deal with. And more than any philosopher has been trained to deal with, ever. This is a problem that requires a diverse field of relevant experts. Unlike a questions such as: "should we socialize health care; should we restrict trade; does inflation lower a gdp?" These are places I think we should let political scientists and economists do their jobs. They are political questions. They are not questions which would be most efficiently solved by game theorists, political scientists, and psychologists; political scientists and economists can handle it.
I like this quazi definition. Certainly it is a problem of distributing advantages (resources, power, interests) among different groups. But that distributing will most likely be done by some group of people. And finding the optimal distribution is by no means an easy problem. It's a really big decision tree. All I'm saying is that the ones who should be finding the optimal path, are those that know the probabilities and expected utilities best. They may not even be the political scientists of today. Perhaps game theorists are today better suited. But we certainly should be careful about how we decide to give people that position. We should use a method which specifically selects those which are best suited for distributing advantages amongst different groups. You don't need to be a political scientist to understand this, in the way that you need to be a political scientist to understand how to distribute advantages amongst competing groups.
I'm willing to drop the term "political scientist" for "relevant expert".
That improves it a lot, but sacrifices specificity. It's easier to say who is a political scientist, much harder to tell who is relevant expert. Knowing who is expert is vital for peer reviewing. But the problem may be overcome by betting.
I am unaware of successes of betting markets in a diverse array of disciplines. Please tell more (not a rhetorical question, I am really curious). Betting markets are even not employed in science.
As for scientific method, it is far from clear what it refers to here. If you mean the ways how scientific community work, peer reviewed journals, grants and such, I doubt it is the key component of success of science. If you mean such things as hypothesis testing, repeatability of experiments, demands on clarity and precision of formulations, mathematical rigour - I find it hard to imagine how these things could be transferred to politics, for different reasons.
You included political scientists both in group of people who will efficiently handle the question and group of those who will not, was that a typo?
The questions including "should" are tricky. Should we restrict alcohol consumption? Yes, it has wretched many lifes. No, what's better than drinking cold beer after a long day - and if someone wants to catch cirrhosis, his problem.
I agree that different questions need different experts, we disagree about what actual expertise is needed. You seem to say that the problem of democratic politics is incompetence, in the sense that politicians don't know the expected utilities of their decisions. But the big problem is that there are no clear-cut utilities out there. Even if we forget common circular preferences and inconsitencies, there are different people with conflicting utility functions who even don't agree on a meta-principle according to which their utilities are to be compared. Politicians probably practically understand this better than many economists who tend to flatten complex "should" questions into questions of fact like "does inflation lower GDP". Politicians have access to analogous expert opinions and if they seem to act contrary to them, it needn't be caused by their ignorance.
When visionaries are designing their utopias, they often fall prey to several mistakes. First, they assume knowledge of other people's wishes and priorities, and expect more consistency, uniformity and harmony than there actually is. Second, they assume no large-scale opposition against the very utopian system, thus not addressing the problem of the system's stability. Third, they state the utopia in broad terms, not paying attention to details which can be used to game the system. It is much harder to find flaws in a vague description.
What you have, in my opinion, omitted from consideration:
Betting markets reliably predict the weather better than meteorologists. Probably cause the meteorologist doesn't make more money if he spends 12 hours collecting data, instead of 6. People betting do.
We have lot's of instincts that can be symbolized by lots of things.
How? Mind you everyone has the right to play the betting market, and if you get good at it, your bets will start being used to institute policies.
Again, anybody can join the ranks of the elite gamblers, they just have to gamble well enough. All betting records of all elite gamblers will be completely open knowledge. And so will the complete list of proposals. You can start betting whenever you want, but only after you achieve a certain score do your bets actually start effecting policy decisions, and after a higher score you may propose new policies to bet on.
I'm not sure what you mean. I agree with a policy that I think optimizes happiness, and I say that a policy works, if I think it will optimize happiness. So I can't imagine thinking a policy works that I disagree with.
I would point you to this sentence in OP:
Anybody can become a scientist or a millionaire, in the sense that there is no law preventing that. Normally most people don't have enough intelligence, perseverance and/or luck to do it. Most people will not be elite gamblers even if they tried. It seems that natural reaction in such a situation wouldn't be "well, perhaps I don't really understand politics". I would rather be "the system is rigged, they have conspired to vote against the common sense policy to gain personal advantage". Sure, conspiracy theories can emerge in a voting system too. But voting has positive connotations, it is associated with fairness, it is the natural thing to do when a group of people has to decide about something. Connotations of gambling are far less honourable.
I have read the sentence in the OP, but I don't see how it addresses the problems in social workings of science. I am even not sure what insight the sentence had to convey. It sounds like a tautological triviality - solution to an extremely difficult scientific problem is "extremely good science" almost by definition.
I thought that "works" means "has the expected consequences", not "maximises happiness". If "works" means "maximises happiness" and this meaning of "working" is what the policies are supposed to be checked against, then my objection of course doesn't apply. On the other hand, you are now subject to all criticisms of happiness-maximising utilitarianism, and more, you can be accused of trying to impose your value system on others.
If they gamble on something which doesn't actually optimize happiness and is only in their interest, they'll loose money.
I agree, it is trivial. Politics is a really tough scientific problem, and it requires really good science to solve it. Turns out voting on hypotheses, or researchers isn't very good science.
What a government might do that isn't to either: spread happiness, increase net happiness, or avoid suffering, I can't imagine.
I meant that political scientists can handle it alone. Without the aid of psychologists and game theorists, more effectively than if they employed the methods of game theorists and psychologists.
It is certainly hard to imagine. But satellites which scan over facial expressions to measure net happiness (totally doable today), and decision theory, provide at least a little bit of imaginative fuel as to how it might be done. Applying the scientific method in a new field is always awkward at first; that's the burden of a new field. But I find it highly probable, that the best way to make progress in filling in the utilities and probabilities of the political decision tree is through empiricism.
Of course, there has to be such a tree, since some political decisions are better than others. The political utility of a given state may not be exactly specifiable, but that the utility of living in a place with accessible education, out weights that of living in a place where all else remains the same, but education is inaccessible, is rather clear.
I'll address 1 - 4 when i get back from school.
How do you plan to avoid capture of what ever body is tasked with determining who won any given bet? Lastly, down voted because I don't like this kind of political post. I asked a question about it because I really am interested in the awnser but I don't think this is an appropriate venue for the discussion.
I don't know yet, that's really the tough one. They could always just be paid off. I plan on looking into how they do so in current betting markets.
From what I understand, I'm not an expert, its a pretty major open question that has mostly avoid coming up do to the current markets being fairly low stakes relative to the value the organizers place on their reputations and gathering useful information from the markets.
Every proposal must have a test to determine success as an official part, before betting is allowed on the given proposal. Two proposals with identical policy but different tests are not identical. The test must discriminate between the given policy helping, or hindering, to ensure, increase, or spread, general happiness. You then bet on whether the result of the policy's test will come back positive or negative conditional on instituting the policy.
You may even allow for your test to return degrees of success, and bet on ranges of success.
Obviously, if you're proposal is to get more farming done. And you think it will increase happiness because food is good. The test for success that you should put down is sample of food production before policy, and sample after. Sometimes top gamblers may not be sure if people like something, and then to find out they should use neuron-imaging. After that is done, it is a matter of whether a given policy will increase the availability of the desired state or thing, or decrease the availability of the disliked state or thing. If some people like it and some hate it, the optimal is to have everybody be able to do what they want as much as possible.
What about proposals that achieve their stated objectives, but bad unintended consequences in other areas?
that's interesting. I'll get back to you.
You might be right. I'll remove it if I get another complaint.
Don't remove stuff just because of complaints. Edit to improve because of complaints/criticism, sure, but just deleting stuff that might have potential eliminates that potential entirely.
Well it might as well be eliminated now, no one is going to see it anyway, I unfortunately don't have any valid critiques from this blog yet. So, I'll def keep it up to see if I can catch any.