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FiftyTwo comments on More "Stupid" Questions - Less Wrong
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Comments (495)
Why are lesswrongers so against involvement in politics? The fact that tribalism exists and is bad is fairly well known, but it remains the case that the vast majority of power and resources in the world as it exists at the moment is controlled via political processes.
My understanding is that it's not that involvement in politics that is somehow bad, but that discussing politics here is perilous, just like discussing feminism and PUA is, or sports, or any other subject matter where identity and opinions are intertwined. If anything, MIRI/CFAR should be doing more in terms of lobbying.
Would you like to try a non-intertwined conversation? :-)
When you say lobbying, what do you mean and how is it the most effective?
Lobbying as in advocacy. Google thought they could get away with no political lobbying, until they learned the hard truth. MIRI is not in the same position as Google of course, but the lessons are the same: if you want to convince people, just doing good and important work is not enough, you also have to do a good job convincing good and important people that you are doing good and important work. MIRI/CFAR are obviously doing some work in this direction, like target recruiting of the bright young mathematicians, but probably not nearly enough. I suspect they never even paid a top-notch marketing professional to prepare an evaluation. I bet they are just winging it, hoping to ride the unexpected success of HPMoR (success in some circles, anyway).
Actually, the first was Microsoft. Their (deliberate) ignorance of politics cost them the anti-trust investigation and the whole following mess.
Right, forgot about that.
Advocacy is all well and good. But I can't see the analogy between MIRI and Google, not even regarding the lessons. Google, I'm guesssing, was subjected to political extortion for which the lesson was maybe "Move your headquarters to another country" or "To make extra-ordinary business you need to pay extra taxes". I do however agree that the lesson you spell out is a good one.
If all PR is good PR, maybe one should publish HPMoR and sell some hundred copies?
I doubt that publishing an incomplete fanfiction is the best way, unless JKR suddenly endorses it.
Tribalism is bad? Without tribe affiliation you die and so probably do your memes. I think in your case your thinking about tribalism may be like a fish's thinking about water: it is ubiquitous, transparent, and you can't imagine life without it, and so you treat it as if it were nothing.
As to why lesswrongers seem less involved in politics... my thoughts. As wonky creative types we are way more interested in policy than the sausage-making of winning. We would be more interested in advising the president than in being the president, because we would be more interested in considering 22 different unrealistic policies and their implications than we would be in buttonholing 22 senators and trading pork with them for votes on the one policy which has percolated to the top which I do not have the time to truly understand myself because I need to get it passed.
Most politics is like driving a bus on the same route every day, and in local politics the route is not very big.
I don't have the impression that LWers are against involvement in politics.
Politics is a zero sum game in which you spend 500 billion dollars to no avail except for forcing your opponent to spend 510 to win. Millions if people are already trying to win this zero sum game already. Might as well ask "why not just win the World Series of poker, then use that money to fund Miri?"
I don't think this is true in most political contexts. Political activity is often positive-sum or negative-sum.
People do make compromises that improve total utility. Special interests demanding special handling aren't always wrong -- sometimes they do have special concerns that can be met cheaply, and that ought to be.
Conversely, political process can be negative sum. It sometimes results in inefficiencies -- either rent-seeking or awkward half-measures that produce less utility than if one faction had total control.
This is assuming you're trying to do politics yourself instead of just deciding who to support.
If politics is a zero sum game, why are some political entities so incredibly more productive than others? Do you think US politics has NOTHING to do with US GDP?
Politics is not a game at all, never mind zero-sum. Politics is the acquisition and exercise of power in a society.
I am also not sure that LW is against involvement in politics. LW doesn't like to discuss politics for well-known reasons. On the other hand, skills of most people on LW and skills necessary to succeed in politics are... not well-matched.
Piggyback question on this: why aren't LessWrongers finding and exploiting cognitive biases in markets in order to raise funds for their projects?
I realize that (a) it's really hard to do this or everyone would do it; and (b) there probably are individual LessWrongers working in finance. But to the extent that LW tends to think that entire fields of experts can be blind in their disciplines in ways disciplined rationalists are not (theologians, philosophers, doctors, politicians, educators, physicists), there would seem to be the prospect of some massively profitable arbitrage or prediction somewhere. And it's not like any of LessWrong's projects are allergic to funding.
My theory is that initially people who believe they can beat the experts in a variety of fields try to beat the experts at testable matters, which are the natural choice for someone wanting to demonstrate superiority or gain funding. At that point one of 3 things can happen: a: success that others recognize, b: re-calibration of self assessment, c: maintenance of the belief by change of the subject matters to non testable (those without strong feedback).
Large well funded markets are smarter than lesswrongers.
Experts with incentives that reward epistemic accuracy and have significant direct feedback from the universe can usually be assumed to be reliable. All else being equal this would lead us to trust index funds, be wary of managed funds and be sceptical of paid financial advice.