I think this definitely can happen. The Liberal Democrats in the UK (third party, colloquially the Lib Dems) gained support in the 2010 election by pledging not to vote for increases in tuition fees for UK universities. They were able to form a coalition government with the Conservative party after the 2015 election. The Lib Dems hadn’t been in power before (though their predecessor, the Liberal party, hadn’t been in power since the 1920s).
The coalition government increased tuition fees by a factor of 3. There were widespread protests at universities, mostly peaceful though one bloke did lob a fire extinguisher off a roof. The Liberal Democrats never recovered, going from 57 seats to 8 at the next election in 2015. I was a member of the party around 2017, and many people I spoke to said “I used to vote for them but then they increased tuition fees”.
This doesn’t prove a causal link (people might have just been annoyed at the coalition government’s austerity policies, and used tuition fees as a totem of that) but people do literally say “I liked Nick Clegg but he betrayed his position on tuition fees and I’ll never vote Lib Dem again.”
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.
The reason I thought they were non-epsilon was “it sure seems like people are not willing to go on record as saying AI x-risk is important” (going on record in favor of “AI safety” is probably easy).
Generally, going on record saying something out-of-the-overton window I think counts for nontrivial integrity. (But, this isn’t what I really said in the post, to be fair)
(edit: agreed that quantifying how strong a signal is is important, and not at all sure the strengths I implied here are correct, although I think they are in at least a relative fashion)
well I said “harder to fake”, not ironclad or “sufficiently hard to fake.” It’s better than “in private, he said he cared about My Pet Cause”
I do think people sometimes get mad at and vote out politicians that betrayed a principle they care about, esp. if they are a single-issue voter.
I think this definitely can happen. The Liberal Democrats in the UK (third party, colloquially the Lib Dems) gained support in the 2010 election by pledging not to vote for increases in tuition fees for UK universities. They were able to form a coalition government with the Conservative party after the 2015 election. The Lib Dems hadn’t been in power before (though their predecessor, the Liberal party, hadn’t been in power since the 1920s).
The coalition government increased tuition fees by a factor of 3. There were widespread protests at universities, mostly peaceful though one bloke did lob a fire extinguisher off a roof. The Liberal Democrats never recovered, going from 57 seats to 8 at the next election in 2015. I was a member of the party around 2017, and many people I spoke to said “I used to vote for them but then they increased tuition fees”.
This doesn’t prove a causal link (people might have just been annoyed at the coalition government’s austerity policies, and used tuition fees as a totem of that) but people do literally say “I liked Nick Clegg but he betrayed his position on tuition fees and I’ll never vote Lib Dem again.”
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.
The reason I thought they were non-epsilon was “it sure seems like people are not willing to go on record as saying AI x-risk is important” (going on record in favor of “AI safety” is probably easy).
Generally, going on record saying something out-of-the-overton window I think counts for nontrivial integrity. (But, this isn’t what I really said in the post, to be fair)
(edit: agreed that quantifying how strong a signal is is important, and not at all sure the strengths I implied here are correct, although I think they are in at least a relative fashion)