we should ask "Given the current policies, what circumstances are best?".
I guess it's to be born in a powerful family of oligarchs, preferably ones that are not abusive to their children, as an intelligent non-asperger person who can learn how to play the game.
We ought to be studying the sociopolitical system and taking advantage of its patterns and loopholes.
Uhm... any useful reincarnation tips?
Actually, I like your idea. I am just not sure how big change could we make "merely" by studying the system and applying the advantages. More than zero, certainly, but we could still be kinda disappointed with the result, because we expected more. (Also, it may require us to sacrifice some other values.)
But taking advantage of the system seems to me like an experimental verification that your model is correct.
This reminds me: many years ago, one of my friends expressed a strong political opinion that in capitalism you don't need any skills or work to get rich; you just have to start with some money and then it automatically makes more money. Thus people born in rich families get more rich, and others don't have a chance. I said that to make your money make more money, you still need some plan, and you need to execute it, which not literally eveyone can do. My friend objected that you just pay other people to do the work and the thinking for you, and that's all.
At that moment I started playing with numbers, and showed my friend that he could get enough money to start a company and pay two or three people for one year... which according to his simplistic model should be enough to start the accelerating money spiral (he just needs to make one of them a manager, who would design plans and make the other person or two realize them; and then my friend can pay them fixed salary and take all the profit). I told him that if he really believes that, I will get him the money, in return for a part of the profit. My friend quickly updated his theory, and said that this is not enough, and you need 100 × more money to get to the level where money starts making other money automatically. (Of course, no justification for the number 100 was provided.)
Actually, I like your idea. I am just not sure how big change could we make "merely" by studying the system and applying the advantages. More than zero, certainly, but we could still be kinda disappointed with the result, because we expected more. (Also, it may require us to sacrifice some other values.)
Well more than zero is still more than zero, right? I think if you expect to be disappointed by the results of an endeavor, then you may as well revise your expectations downward from the start, so I don't see that as much of an obstacle. (I a...
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: