I have greater-than-50% credence on the claim that I have much better structural priors for human politics than most people. I grant that for any given poobah I’m likely to be ignorant of many details about them, but I claim that I understand the forest well enough that some ignorance about some trees is tolerable. Most people have never heard of selectorate theory, or the general welfare theorem, or incentive compatibility, or coup prediction, or the Myerson Satterthwaite theorem or … <such things>.
Most people think the FDA (or their local governmental equivalent which copies the US’s local catastrophe) is good. Most people haven’t got much of an opinion on whether or how or why common law might be relatively efficient.
I cited the “outdated” article from June of 2020 because it substantiated “that New Zealand managed a travel quarantine” if readers were ignorant of those details. Also, by then, it was in the zeitgeist that either (1) covid would turn out to be a relative nothing burger with less than maybe 50,000 global or national deaths or else (2) New Zealand’s response was nearly the only competent response by any western country with a democratically elected leader and would be retrospectively worthy of praise.
(I think New Zealand’s proportional representation was a significant structural cause of being lucky enough to have Ardern in charge when it counted, to make the one most important and non-trivial decision of her political career, but I don’t believe that most people even know what that is, and so they almost certainly can’t have a theory for why it shows up a lot, empirically, when one looks for relatively functional human political systems.)
Since June of 2020, probably more than 23 million people have died, globally, of covid and as a proportion of population New Zealand has still has far fewer deaths than most places.
I guess I could be wrong about the details of the causality? Maybe New Zealand had someone “like Anthony Fauci, with a substantive bureaucratic role and key position during a moment of crisis, except good-and-competent instead of evil-and-lying” who made the critical calls, and all Ardern did was listen to that person? Maybe she was lucky at random? I honestly don’t know enough about the details to be sure how to do detailed credit assignment internal to that relatively successful policy making loop.
As to the difficulty of getting 10,000 houses built per year. Prior to you saying this, I didn’t know she was a YIMBY, so I’ve gone from “she could easily have been a NIMBY and slightly but tolerably worse in my eyes” to “oh huh, now I like her even better”.
Given this level of ignorance, and granting that I might be off base about some details you know and I don’t, I would say that structurally, the housing crisis is a very veryvery common problem across nearly the entire western world, where housing policies are systematically broken because the median voter doesn’t even understand what’s wrong with the normal policies, and regularly “says yay” to the structural factors that can be causally traced back to harms they “say boo” to.
Given this background model, and I give Ardern credit for at least being on the right (pro-prosperity and pro-growth) side but I don’t think her failure to cut through the stupidity and misanthropy and level level corruption of the rest of the system should be held uniquely against her. My hunch is that her allies could not stomach the “political backlash” of the structure changes that would have been required to achieve the 10k home construction goal?
I think, fundamentally, covid was THE thing to get right in late 2019 and early 2020 and almost every country got it wrong. Ardern got it the most right.
I think the BEST way to get things right is probably for a small number of people to hammer out an (1) adequate plan (2) that round trips through the random and confused beliefs of the voters (which they can), and (3) secures buy-in from enough politicos (some of whom exist), such that success can be grabbed by hand, and held together with bailing wire, since there’s no way in hell that The System can do anything novel and good by any method other than “a small number of people do the right thing by hand” while being lucky enough to not be squashed like a bug by the forces of random-default-stupidity.
I think FLI rang the fire alarm. I think Eliezer proposed a better response to the fire alarm than they did. I think “both sides” have self-nominated to be part of the initial “small group”. I want them very very very much to succeed. I want them to have the vocal support of as many people as possible, and I want this because I want to be happy and also even just alive 12 years from now. Reliably. On purpose. Like my civilization was even slightly functional.
I have greater-than-50% credence on the claim that I have much better structural priors for human politics than most people. I grant that for any given poobah I’m likely to be ignorant of many details about them, but I claim that I understand the forest well enough that some ignorance about some trees is tolerable. Most people have never heard of selectorate theory, or the general welfare theorem, or incentive compatibility, or coup prediction, or the Myerson Satterthwaite theorem or … <such things>.
Most people think the FDA (or their local governmental equivalent which copies the US’s local catastrophe) is good. Most people haven’t got much of an opinion on whether or how or why common law might be relatively efficient.
I cited the “outdated” article from June of 2020 because it substantiated “that New Zealand managed a travel quarantine” if readers were ignorant of those details. Also, by then, it was in the zeitgeist that either (1) covid would turn out to be a relative nothing burger with less than maybe 50,000 global or national deaths or else (2) New Zealand’s response was nearly the only competent response by any western country with a democratically elected leader and would be retrospectively worthy of praise.
(I think New Zealand’s proportional representation was a significant structural cause of being lucky enough to have Ardern in charge when it counted, to make the one most important and non-trivial decision of her political career, but I don’t believe that most people even know what that is, and so they almost certainly can’t have a theory for why it shows up a lot, empirically, when one looks for relatively functional human political systems.)
Since June of 2020, probably more than 23 million people have died, globally, of covid and as a proportion of population New Zealand has still has far fewer deaths than most places.
I guess I could be wrong about the details of the causality? Maybe New Zealand had someone “like Anthony Fauci, with a substantive bureaucratic role and key position during a moment of crisis, except good-and-competent instead of evil-and-lying” who made the critical calls, and all Ardern did was listen to that person? Maybe she was lucky at random? I honestly don’t know enough about the details to be sure how to do detailed credit assignment internal to that relatively successful policy making loop.
As to the difficulty of getting 10,000 houses built per year. Prior to you saying this, I didn’t know she was a YIMBY, so I’ve gone from “she could easily have been a NIMBY and slightly but tolerably worse in my eyes” to “oh huh, now I like her even better”.
Given this level of ignorance, and granting that I might be off base about some details you know and I don’t, I would say that structurally, the housing crisis is a very very very common problem across nearly the entire western world, where housing policies are systematically broken because the median voter doesn’t even understand what’s wrong with the normal policies, and regularly “says yay” to the structural factors that can be causally traced back to harms they “say boo” to.
Given this background model, and I give Ardern credit for at least being on the right (pro-prosperity and pro-growth) side but I don’t think her failure to cut through the stupidity and misanthropy and level level corruption of the rest of the system should be held uniquely against her. My hunch is that her allies could not stomach the “political backlash” of the structure changes that would have been required to achieve the 10k home construction goal?
I think, fundamentally, covid was THE thing to get right in late 2019 and early 2020 and almost every country got it wrong. Ardern got it the most right.
I think, fundamentally, AGI is THE thing to get right in 2022 and 2023, and I would like almost every country to NOT get it wrong. SOMEONE has to get this right, or there’s a substantial probability that all we humans will be dead in a few years.
I think the BEST way to get things right is probably for a small number of people to hammer out an (1) adequate plan (2) that round trips through the random and confused beliefs of the voters (which they can), and (3) secures buy-in from enough politicos (some of whom exist), such that success can be grabbed by hand, and held together with bailing wire, since there’s no way in hell that The System can do anything novel and good by any method other than “a small number of people do the right thing by hand” while being lucky enough to not be squashed like a bug by the forces of random-default-stupidity.
I think FLI rang the fire alarm. I think Eliezer proposed a better response to the fire alarm than they did. I think “both sides” have self-nominated to be part of the initial “small group”. I want them very very very much to succeed. I want them to have the vocal support of as many people as possible, and I want this because I want to be happy and also even just alive 12 years from now. Reliably. On purpose. Like my civilization was even slightly functional.