Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum

And voting adds legitimacy to it.

Thank you.

#annoyedbymotivatedcognition

And voting adds legitimacy to it.

Thank you.

#annoyedbymotivatedcognition

I do think you are wrong, but I don't have any idea of whether you are stupid.

I was using stupid only to reference the title of Eliezer's post Reversed Stupidity is Not Inteligence. Also I wanted to emphasise that I think there is a good high possibility in my mind around say 0.2 or so that I'm utterly wrong on this. Also that I don't want to claim any high status from having such opinions.

What seems most likely to me is that you are naive and enjoy the feeling that you have found a clever solution that most people cannot see

Indeed I may just be high on insight porn. This would also explain why well written and argued out anti-democracy posts get up voted here (not in this thread obviously but check out my comment history or that of Vladimir_M or Athrelon or any of the dozen other reactionary rationalists) since we are a community of people self-selected for enjoying the feeling of insight. Arguably insight porn is a important reason for why say Marxism and other similar ideologies where heavily overrepresented in 20th century academia as well.

Also worth mentioning is the metacontrarian ladder. Opinions as tribal attire naturally imply opinions as signalling and that strengthens the common observation of the existence of intellectual fashions. For morality too obviously.

that you enjoy that feeling so much that your threshold for checking the validity of he clever solution is unreasonably low

I don't think this is so because I've spent a lot of time trying to steel man democracy for myself and reading political science written on it. And as I say in a different post at the end of the day despite having high confidence in the sucky-ness of democracy, and think it more likely than not several alternatives would be better, I still defer to the conservative argument in favour of democracy and indeed wouldn't vote to institute Neocameralism or Monarchy right now. Just out of curiosity do you recall any politically charged arguments that have basically convinced you but aren't comfortable implementing them because of Burkean concerns? Preferably ones that have a real shot of being implemented.

I think our community with its love of novelty and insight porn is particularly vulnerable to systematically under weighting that argument.

If Romney had won I might still have posted "I voted. We achieved a local optimum." I would have been less energized to make that post because the local optimum under Romney would, under my values, been a bit lower than the one we are going to get under Obama.

Do you consider democracy more a preference discovery machine, that is good at finding the preferences of the population and thus gives insight into the preferences of agents. Or do you think democracy is more a mechanism of aggregating information in a wisdom of the crowds way where the input of lots and lots of people leads to good outputs.

Please pick which you more strongly ascribe too even if both or neither apply.

Do you consider democracy more a preference discovery machine, that is good at finding the preferences of the population and thus gives insight into the preferences of agents. Or do you think democracy is more a mechanism of aggregating information in a wisdom of the crowds way where the input of lots and lots of people leads to good outputs.

A little more on preference vs wisdom. I don't think there is a bright line separating the two things, especially as implemented on the ground.

It seems to me that people generally believe, and state strenuously, ... (read more)

2mwengler14y

Abso-fucking-lutely! 1) I would abolish all tariffs and trade protections, that's how I would vote and argue. If given the power to do it unilaterally against the expressed will of the republic I would not take it. 2) I would abolish the income tax and fund the gov't with various forms of consumption taxes instead. I would phase in the differences probably linearly over 10 years. I wouldn't do it without the republic agreeing. 3) In the past I have made the aspirational statement "I am a communist until you are 18 and a libertarian after that." I consider the socialization of "parental" responsibility to be a brilliant way to increase production and lower costs. I consider the fact that you can't find a rich parent who doesn't "throw money at the problem" even as he cries in a hurt and angry voice that the government is stealing his money and wasting it by "throwing money at problems." I will argue this and cajole and persuade and vote accordingly, but I wouldn't take more than the Republic would give me. 4) I would eliminate rules about who has to pay extra for petroleum products and just let the price decide. If a farmer needs a truck to bring produce 100 miles, the economy is better off if he makes his capital investments reflecting a fair and straight market competition with the soccer mom bringing her 3 year old to pre-school in a Hummer. Shocking, but true. I am willing to wait for that wisdom to percolate into the republic rather than subverting the republic. 5) When I was growing up it was still illegal to have sex with my male friend but not with my female friend. This in the 1970s in a place no less opinion-leading than New York State! As it turns out, this is one that HAS percolated broadly into the current legal structure. I count that as evidence that my idea that republics can work. And sex laws aren't the only win. In my lifetime telephony, commercial air and truck transport, and radio spectrum allocation have been heavily deregulated, risking i

0mwengler14y

Of the two I'd say something like 20:1 preference discovery over wisdom of the crowds. This is me hypothesizing on the fly: every governing system puts day to day control in the hands of a tiny minority, and an even smaller group of people who have the time, resources, and legitimacy to manage that tiny minority. It is inevitable that the decisions will not please everyone, and in some trivial sense, it is inevitable that the decisions will not please anyone, even the single most powerful government leader, who must still find himself constrained by human nature and other realities. Of the choices I am aware of, a republic with principles such as (near) universal citizenship and (near) universal suffrage results in the greatest breadth of consideration of the preferences of the population. If I had a choice between getting rid of the bill of rights or getting rid of universal suffrage, I would toss suffrage first. Voting is just ONE tiny way that the information flows up from the bottom to the top. Voting seems to put a nice catch-all loop around the whole process, but I'd want to keep the day to day guts, enabled by strong concepts of nearly universal rights, than to lose the day to day and have a mass of lied-to and oppressed people voting once in a while. The problem with all alternatives I usually think of are they move MORE power into the day-to-day runners, which are necessarily a tiny minority. Even in a well functioning republic, it is hard to distinguish whether the legislators all get rich because the skills that make you rich are what make you electable or because they vote with a bias towards their own interests, at least every once in a while on the margin, or because they exploit inside information, or because they are handed wealth by those who wish to "befriend" them and influence them. Of course in a republic it will always be all of the above, but the democracy component will be constantly throwing stumbling blocks in the way of the specially g

-19

Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum

-19

-19

-19

Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum

-19

-19