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ChristianKl comments on Gaming Democracy - Less Wrong
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Others have critiqued this idea on the basis that it's essentially lobbying by one interest group or another - even if you don't offer money for a campaign you can offer the votes of those people who strongly share your interests.
I'd critique it on the grounds that the triad of intelligent/politically unaffiliated/cares a great deal about this particular issue simply doesn't give you enough people to work with. Picking up people who are politically unaffiliated and have a particular passion about a political issue is much more difficult than it might seem. Most people vote on either self-interest or sacred values (or some combination of the two). Opposing homeopathy is probably a good idea, but you'd be hard-pressed to find people who can clearly see it's in their self-interest (a few million saved every year on needless treatments amounts to mere cents for them a year, most likely) or aligns with their sacred values (most people see homeopathy as stupid, not as evil).
I don't think looking into the theory of interests groups is a bad idea at all, merely that this particular technique requires issues that have significant political muscle to begin with. As a general rule I suspect good policy is better served by moving the Overton Window than by hacking various features of democracy.
It's not even that clear that there is money saved. Homeopathy provides rather cheap placebos and the people might otherwise seek more expensive treatment.
Doesn't that raise the possibility that in order to save people's money you should encourage more homeopathy? After all, if homeopathy is overall beneficial compared to no homeopathy because people save more by using placebos than they lose in expensive treatment, wouldn't it be a pretty big coincidence that we're at exactly the optimum level of placeboness? If not, then perhaps the maximum savings happens at a rate of homeopathy that is even larger than the current one.
I think that's certainly an interesting idea - NHS-homeopathy could be even cheaper than what is currently provided (comissioning the services off a private homeopathy provider) because we could do it in bulk - the raw ingredients aren't expensive at all. I'd worry about the indirect cost of moving the Overton Window though - at the moment we STRONGLY advise people not to use homeopathy even for trivial conditions, and we mock those that promote it. Even so, many people still use it and swear by its efficacy. If we moved to a situation where we promoted homeopathy for minor conditions and gave its practitioners the stamp of NHS/Government approval, we would see many more people using it for minor conditions and - I would expect - some people begin to use it for major conditions. Thus the money we save on prescribing a placebo over an active drug might be sucked up by the cost of treating the complications of people who take homeopathic treatments to manage AF and then get a massive stroke, for example.
But I think as a matter of principle we should set the level of homeopathy at whatever maximises the number of healthy life-years per unit of spending, even if that is not zero.