Why Every Politician Thinks They’re So Right (and Why That’s a Disaster)
Since childhood, I have been troubled by the following paradox: Suppose that in some country there are several parties. Each of them has its own vision of how to achieve economic and all other kinds of prosperity. Let’s assume they are all driven purely by the desire to help the country[1]. Suppose these parties do certain things that are destructive to the country but effective for gaining power — for example, things that are obviously bad if you thought about them for 10 minutes, but most people didn’t spend those 10 minutes (e.g., direct governmental control of some companies). The paradox is this: from the outside it seems that if all the parties simply stopped engaging in populism together, the country would be better off, because if everyone stopped doing populism at the same time, the same party would end up in power, but it would no longer be forced to fulfill silly pre-election promises. However, if you are one of the party leaders, it seems to you that if you use populism to come to power, you will be able to apply your truest vision of the economy, not only to repair the damage from populism, but ultimately to come out ahead. It is very strange that from the outside, for the good of the people, you should not use populism, but from the inside—you should. What would a politician of this country say if I explained this to him? I think something like: “Well, other parties are just wrong, and we are not; if they use populism, that's bad because they do it to obtain power to implement their bad policies, and our policies are good." Here there is a counter-argument understandable to anyone: “Almost all people (at least all your political opponents) make mistakes; that is, people do not know how to seek truth, and often are extremely certain of something and then turn out to be wrong. And now, the climax: you are a human!” [Read the last three lines two more times] “But I am smarter than average!” “Some of your political opponents are also smarter than
Let's run a simulation of current situation with AI to find out the probability of not dying. We may also find out, what should the anti-AI team do in order to prevent the AI doom.