My impression (primarily from former representative Justin Amash) is that individual congresspeople have almost no power. Bills are crafted and introduced at the party level, and your choices are to vote with them or not. If you don't vote with the party and are in a safe district (which most are), the party will support candidates who will go along with the party line in the primary. The only scenario in which an individual congressperson has power is a close vote in a contested district where the party can't take the risk of a primary challenger.
First, I want to know if which parts of this are true, and in more detail. One guy tweeting does not constitute proof. Are elected officials sitting around watching Netflix all day, or do they still have the power to privately horse trade to support their goals.
Second, assuming it is true, where did the power go? Parties aren't real, the power must be in specific humans or incentive systems. Does it all rest in the top three elected officials of each party? Their staff? Unelected party officers?
I'm very interested in evidence and arguments in either direction.
Some social groups develop a dynamic where you can steal status by criticizing someone else's taste. I first observed this on fark.com in the mid-2000s, where a woman would develop a reputation as hot, and then men would find more and more fault with her, to dunk on the guys praising her.
Now I'm noticing it as I try to buy well-made but not crazy expensive women's sweaters[1]. There's a pareto frontier of cost vs quality, and I don't see any shame in not maximizing quality. But any brand I check on reddit, no matter how expensive, has been denigrating its quality. Of course I can't know that this is to make themselves feel emotionally bigger, but it's always portrayed as a fundamental truth rather than a data point. And it's always "no they're gross" rather than "X has better quality for the money and Y is cheaper for the same quality"
But then I went looking for examples, and it seemed a little more complicated. It was harder to find the sneering comments than I expected. At least some people claim that, for the high-quality knock-off brand I was considering, it's about respect for intellectual property. That definitely could be cover for status-policing but I 🤨 at knock-off legos so I think there's some legitimacy to it.
In this odyssey I also learned that "discount resellers" like Marshalls, and TJ Maxx[2] market themselves as selling overstock from other stores, but in fact most of their stock was always intended for their stores. Name brands will license their branding to the discounters to produce cheaper products with the designer label, so you can't trust their quality. For TJ Maxx and Marshalls you can check this by looking at the last digit in the ID number (1= produced for discounter, 2 = genuine overstock).
Normally I'm fine with Amazon fast fashion but they save money on warm things by knitting them out of tissue paper. I suspected this problem was inherent in cheap sweaters but was afraid paying more would just get me more expensive tissue paper. I didn't feel like going through 10 return cycles, so I tried out spending real money on well regarded brands.
It worked out okay, but a week later I found some delightful sweaters for $13 at Ross Dress For Less. One snagged a thread while I was in the store and I'll be shocked if they're wearable next winter, but for now they are quite warm[3].
the tragedy to me is that there was enough physical space for everyone, but people clustered into a much tighter area than they needed to. The drop off at one space was sharp even though there was at most a very mild physical feature delineating it.
their legislators already wanted to regulate the big AI companies, and they (and their staffers) are smart enough to distinguish it from the sloppy AI bills they usually see
This got me thinking: what's the marginal return on placing or educating staffers, as opposed to electing a believer?
Yeah it's possible all you need is a few high powered people who Get It and a good ecosystem for lobbying everyone else, but then you have to evaluate the lobbyists.
For politicians in particular I mean skills like "knowing who to defer to" and "horse trading to get the bill passed without losing critical parts".
But thinking about the ecosystem as a whole, writing and nursing good legislation is also a skill I don't particularly know how to evaluate, which means I couldn't evaluate PACs or lobbyists even if I had perfect knowledge of their actions and thoughts.
[Epistemic status: puzzling something out, very uncertain, optimizing for epistemic legibility so I’m easy to argue with. All specific numbers are ass pulls]
In my ideal world, the anti-X-risk political ecosystem has an abundance of obviously high quality candidates. This doesn’t appear to be on the table.
Adjusting for realism, my favorite is probably “have a wide top of funnel for AI safety candidates, narrow sharply as they have time to demonstrate traits we can judge them on”. But this depends on having an ecosystem with good judgement, and I’m not sure that that’s actually realistic.
I think it’s probably pretty easy to identify the top political candidates. These are the people like Alex Bores, who have a track record of getting hard legislation through their legislature and leave public evidence of strongly understanding the issue. If I had to put a number on it I’d count us as indescribably lucky to have 5% of candidates be this obviously good.
It’s also pretty easy to identify the worst candidates, by track record or by the financial support of pro-AI PACs. Let’s optimistically put this at the bottom 50% of candidates.
I don’t expect getting the obviously great 5% elected/appointed to be enough to win on AI safety issues. I also low-confidence expect supporting the middle 45% uniformly to be worse than doing nothing. And not just because some of them are lying- but because useful legislation is such a narrow target, and lots of people mean well without having the skill to actually be helpful. There’s also the negative externalities of crowding out better candidates. Say we need the 80-95th percentile candidates to win. A candidate who competes for the same support, who is well meaning but less competent than the 80th percentile, is actively taking away from better candidates.*
[*You can come up with math where this is okay if resources are abundant and the lesser candidates are merely less good rather than actively bad, but I expect resources to be tight and doing more harm than good to be easy. You can also solve a lot of this problem with web-of-trust, but we need something that will scale]
In this world, it becomes critical to distinguish 80-95th percentile candidates from 50th-80th. Let’s optimistically assume this can happen, even if it hasn’t yet. In that exact state, how should I feel about assisting a 0-track record candidate? Or maybe, how should someone with no budget constraints think about it?
Logically, my guess is that starting to lay down fertilizer so the judges have something to judge once they’re in place is net helpful. Intuitively, I feel the opposite. If forced to justify this I will say things like “having a bunch of mid people with things to lose make it harder to create the skillful judging system”, but these might be rationalizations.
Some cruxes in this model:
Being net beneficial on AI safety via government work is a very narrow target.
It is easy to do net harm to your sincerely held goals.
If there is a money firehose, people will mouth the words needing to access it, regardless of their actual beliefs or intentions.
^ has significant costs beyond the mere loss of money.
Judging the impact of politicians and appointees is extremely difficult even when you have all the information.
Most of the relevant information will be hidden.
Bringing on too many candidates too quickly, before a judgement apparatus is set up, will harm the ability to set up the judgement apparatus.
I think quantifying how strong a particular signal is will be an important part of having a self-correcting political coalition. My guess is that public statements of this kind are epsilon, but I'm open to data I'm wrong.
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can you expand on "leadership of committees and the parties consolidating more role-based power (especially in the House)"?