we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say. Nobody would have property, you would just contribute towards the state of human happiness when the state told you to and then you would be assigned the goods you needed by the state. To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in

Why do you call inhabitants of such a state "citizens"? They are slaves.

To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in

Interesting. So you would like to be a slave.

Unfortunately, everyone else seems to strongly disagree.

...and do you understand why?

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 don't think that something being (more) mathematically rigorous explains all of what we see. Physicists at one time used to study fluid dynamics. Rayleigh, Kelvin, Stokes, Heisenberg, etc., all have published in the field. You can do quite a lot mathematically in fluids, and I have felt like part of some inner circle because of what I know about fluid dynamics.

Now the field has been basically displaced by quantum mechanics, and it's usually not considered part of "physics" in some sense, and is less popular than I think you might expect if a subject being amenable to mathematical treatment is attractive to some folks. Physicists are generally taught only the most basic concepts in the field. My impression is that the majority of physics undergrads couldn't identify the Navier-Stokes equations, which are the most basic equations for the movement of a fluid.

It could also be that fluids have obvious practical applications (aerodynamics, energy, etc.) and this makes the subject distasteful to pedants. That's just speculation, however. I'm really not sure why fields like physics, etc., are so attractive to some people, though I think you've identified parts of it.

You do make a good point about the sense of completion being different in engineering vs. social science. I suppose the closest you could get in social science is developing some successful self-help book or changing public policy in a good way, but I think these are much harder than building things.

I want to do biological anthropology and archaeology papers, which involve digging up skeletons and chemically analysing them and looking at primate behaviour and early stone tools.

While archaeology certainly seems fun, do you think it will help you understand how to build a better world?

I think you missed what I see as the main point in "What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind." Not surprising, because Moldbug (the guy quoted about the Mugwumps) is terribly long-winded and given to rhetorical flourishes. So let me try to rephrase what I see as the central objection in a format more amenable to LW:

The scientific community is not a massive repository of power, nor is it packed to the gills with masters of rhetoric. The political community consists of nothing but. If you try to run your new party by listening to the scientific community without first making the scientific community far more powerful and independent, what's likely to happen is that the political community makes a puppet of the scientific community, and then you wind up running your politics by listening to a puppet of the political community.

To give a concrete relatable figure: The US National Science Foundation receives about 7.5 billion dollars a year from the US Congress. (According to the NSF, they are the funding source for approximately 24 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America's colleges and universities, which suggests 30 billion federal dollars are out there just for basic research)

The more you promote "Do what the NSF says", the more Congress is going to be interested in using some of those billions of dollars to lean on the NSF and other similar organizations so that you will be promoting "Do what Congress says" at arm's remove. No overt dishonesty needs be involved. Just little things like hiring sympathetic scientists, discouraging controversial research, asking for a survey of a specific metric, etc.

Suppose you make a prediction that a law will decrease the crime rate. You pass the law. You wait a while and see. Did the crime rate go down? Well, how are you measuring crime rate? Which crimes are you counting? To take an example discussed on Less Wrong a while ago, if you use the murder rate as proxy for crime rate over the past few decades, you are going to severely undercount crime because of improvements in medical technology that make worse wounds more survivable.

Obviously you can fix this particular metric now that I've pointed it out. But can you spot and fix such issues in advance faster and better than people throwing around 30 billion dollars and with a massive vested interest in retaining policy control?

When trying to solve something like whether P=NP, you can throw more and brighter scientists at the problem and trust that the problem will remain the same. But the problem of trying to establish science-based policy, particularly when "advocating loads of funding for science", gets harder as it gets more important and you throw more people at it. This is a Red Queen's Race where you have to keep running just to stay in place, because you're not dealing with a mindless question that has an objective answer floating out there, you're dealing with an opposed social force with lots of minds and money that learns from its own mistakes and figures out how to corrupt better, and with more plausible deniability.

I am not your opponent, that is where it begins. Opponent means there is something to win and people compete over that prize. There is nothing to win here except learning, and this discussion quickly turned to be not conducive to it - you got all defensive and emotional instead of trying to understand use my models and see what you can do with them. Opponentism belongs to precise that kind of tribalism you are trying to want to overcome. Interesting, isn't it? Besides you keep being boringly solipsistic. Your strength instead of statistical strength differences, your idea of politeness instead of the social function of politeness... it seems you primarily subject you have useful information about is, well, you. Not interested. The first precondition to being interesting is to understand nobody gives a damn about you. I.e. to get out of the gravity well of the ego, to adopt viewpoints that don't depend strongly on personal desires. I am not even saying I would expect everyone to be able to do it, I am perfectly aware of how long it took for me, how much XP, read, suffering it took, so I don't even blame you for not having made it, it's just that it is seriously difficult to generate information interesting for others from that source. But if you think you can, then do it, say something genuinely interesting, try to offer any sort of a model or information from this utopian-progressivist school that is genuinely different and not the same stuff the mainstream media, BuzzFeed or Tumblr pouring on day and night. The only condition of interestingness is 1) it is not about you 2) it is not "done to death" a million times by the media or blogs.

An ideology would just bias my science and make me worse.

I don't know you well enough to say, but it's quite easy to pretend that one has no ideology. For clear thinking it's very useful to understand one's own ideological positions.

There also a difference between doing science and scientism with is about banner wearing.

There are many different ways to teach knowledge. Academia isn't the only way. You could have a education system where teachers don't go to university to learn how to teach but where they do apprenticeships programs. They sit in the classrooms of experienced teachers and help.

Decrease the amount of time that teachers spend in the classroom to allow for time where teachers discuss with their colleagues what works best.

I think I will not discuss with you this for about 5-10 years, because you sound a lot like me when I was around 21, and I know how naive and inexperienced and entirely unrealistic I was. Ultimately you miss the experiences that would make you far more pessimistic. For example nobody talked about making Western liberal democracies like third-world hellholes, it was about making them like their former selves when crime levels were lower, violence was lower, people were politer, people were politer with women and so on. In fact, turning Western liberal democracies into third-world hellholes is actually happening, but through a different, asylum-seeking / refugee pathway, a perfectly idiotic counter-selection where instead of exercising brain drain, we drain the most damaged people and expect it to turn out good. But that is just a small part of how you probably need to get more pessimistic experience before we can discuss it meaningfully. I have no interest in engaging with angry rants, they are not able to teach me anything, they just sound like both people really sweating and trying to win something, but there is no actual prize to win. Being drunk on the idea of social progress and the improvability of human nature is just like other addictions, you really need to hit rock bottom before you see what is the issue, I think anything I would try to explain here would be pointless without such a wake-up happening. So I wish you luck and maybe re-discuss this again in 5-10 years where you maybe got influenced by more experience.

So I agree with taxing people and using the money to provide universal healthcare, housing, food, etc. Apparently that makes me a socialist.

The correct term is social-democrat, actually. Among the different systems, social democracy has very rarely received full-throated support, but seems to have done among the best at handling the complexity of the values and value-systems that humans want to be materially represented in our societies.

(And HAHAHA!, finally I can just come out and say that without feeling the need to explain reams and reams of background material on both value-complexity and left-wing history!)

Eh, I'm not sure I'm an anything-ist. Socialist ideas make a lot of sense to me, but really I'm a read-a-few-more-books-and-go-to-university-and-then-decide-ist. If I have to stand behind any -ist, it's going to be "scientist". I want to do research to find out which policies most effectively make people happy, and then I want to implement those policies regardless of whether they fall in line with the ideologies that seem attractive to me.

Oh, that's all well and good. I just tend to bring up socialism because I think that "left-wing politics" is more of a hypothesis space of political programs than a single such program (ie: the USSR), but that "bad vibes" in the West from the USSR (and lots and lots of right-wing propaganda) have tended to succeed in getting people to write off that entire hypothesis space before examining the evidence.

I do think that an ideally rational government would be "more" left-wing than right-wing, as current alignments stand, but I too think it would in fact be mixed.

Have some reading material!