But to an extent, the biggest problems - coordination problems, how-do-we-build-a-half-decent-state problems - have been around since the very beginning.
No. The problem of building a state out of 10,000 people who's fasted way of transport is the horse and who have no math is remarkably different from the problem of building a state of tens of millions of people in the age of the internet, cellphones fast airplanes and cars that allow people to travel fast.
The Ancient Egyptians didn't have the math to even think about running a randomized trial to find out whether a certain policy will work. Studying them doesn't tell you anything about how to get our current political system to be more open to make policy based on scientific research.
Evolutionary psychology is incredibly useful for understanding our own biases and fallacies.
I think cognitive psychologists who actually did well controlled experiments were a lot more useful for learning about biases and fallacies than evolutionary psychology.
rather than just carrying my magnifying glass straight over to political science and becoming the three gazillionth and fourth person to ever look for a better more ideal way to do politics.
Most people in political science don't do it well. I don't know of a single student body that changed to a new political system in the last decade.
I did study at the Free University of Berlin which has a very interesting political structure that came out of 68's. At the time there was a rejection of representative democracy and thus even through the government of Berlin wants the student bodies of universities in Berlin to be organised according to representative democracy, out university effectively isn't. Politics students thought really hard around 68 about how to create a more soviet style democracy and the system is still in operation today.
Compared to designing a system like that today's politics students are slacking. The aren't practically oriented.
I'm interested in doing work on rationality problems and cooperation problems, and looking at the origins of the problems and how our current solutions came into being over the course of human history seems worthwhile as part of understanding the problems and figuring out more/better solutions.
If you are interested in rationality problems, there the field of decision science. It's likely more yielding then anthropology. Having a good grasp of academic decision science would be helpful when it comes to designing political systems and likely not enough people in political science deal with that subject.
Are you aware that the American Anthropological Association dropped science from their long-range plan 5 years ago?
I think cognitive psychologists who actually did well controlled experiments were a lot more useful for learning about biases and fallacies than evolutionary psychology.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
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