gjm comments on Open thread, Mar. 9 - Mar. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: MrMind 09 March 2015 07:48AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (109)
Tags: open_thread

Comments (109)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: hydkyll 10 March 2015 11:00:49AM *  5 points [-]

I'm thinking about starting a new political party (in my country getting into parliament as a new party is e̶a̶s̶y̶ not virtually impossible, so it's not necessarily a waste of time). The motivation for this is that the current political process seems inefficient.

Mostly I'm wondering if this idea has come up before on lesswrong and if there are good sources for something like this.

The most important thing is that no explicit policies are part of the party's platform (i.e. no "we want a higher minimum wage"). I don't really have a party program yet, but the basic idea is as follows: There are two parts to this party; the first part is about Terminal Values and Ethical Injunctions. What do we want to achieve and what do we avoid doing even if it seems to get us closer to our goal. The Terminal Values could just be Frankena's list of intrinsic values. The first requirement for people to vote for this party is that they agree with those values.

The second part is about the process of finding good policies. How to design a process that generates policies that help to satisfy our values. Some ideas:

  • complete and utter transparency to fight the inevitable corruption; publish everything the government does
  • instruct experts to find good policies and then listen to them (how would professional politicians know better than them)
    • let the experts give probabilities on explicit predictions how well the policies will work
    • have a public score board that shows how well individual experts did in the past with their predictions
  • when implementing a new policy, set a date at which to evaluate the efficacy and say in advance what you expect
  • if a policy is found to be harmful, get rid of it; don't be afraid to change your mind (but don't make it unnecessarily hard for businesses to plan for the future by changing policies to frequently)
  • react to feedback from the population; don't wait until the next election

The idea is that the party won't really be judged based on the policies it produces but rather on how well it keeps to the specified process. The values and the process is what identifies the party. Of course there should be some room for changing the process if it doesn't work...

The evaluation of policies in terms of how well they satisfy values seems to be a difficult problem. The problem is that Utilitarianism is difficult in practice.

So, there are quite a few open questions.

Comment author: gjm 10 March 2015 01:29:00PM 2 points [-]

in my country new parties can get into parliament easily, so it's not a waste of time

You may be right, and I don't know the details of your situation or your values, but on the face of it that inference isn't quite justified. It depends on what getting into parliament as such actually achieves. E.g., I can imagine that in some countries it's easy for someone to start a new party and get into parliament, but a new one-person party in parliament has basically zero power to change anything. (It seems like there must be some difficulty somewhere along the line, because if getting the ability to make major changes in what your country does is easy then everyone will want to do it and it will get harder because of competition. Unless somehow this is a huge opportunity that you've noticed and no one else has.)

I like the idea of a political party that has meta-policies rather than object-level policies, but it sounds like a difficult thing to sell to the public in sufficient numbers to get enough influence to change anything.

Comment author: hydkyll 10 March 2015 04:40:35PM 3 points [-]

OK, when I said "easy" I exaggerated quite a bit (I edited in the original post). More accurate would be: "in the last three years at least one new party became popular enough to enter parliament" (the country is Germany and the party would be the AfD, before that, there was the German Pirate Party). Actually, to form a new party the signatures from at least 0.1% of all eligible voters are needed.

but it sounds like a difficult thing to sell to the public in sufficient numbers to get enough influence to change anything.

I also see that problem, my idea was to try to recruit some people on German internet fora and if there is not enough interest drop the idea.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit