Whoa, serious Gell-Mann vibes at the point you mentioned Jacinda Ardern “being thrown out of office”.
Jacinda Ardern resigned voluntarily.
At the time, her net favourability was −1%, down from a high of +32%.
Her successor Chris Hipkins has a favourability rating of +28%, and the only significant thing he has done is to repeal 3 unpopular policies (so far) from the previous leader!
I don’t follow New Zealand politics closely, but I think of Ardern as something like “almost the only good elected official of the covid crisis” and the spin I saw in US media (which I grant is often biased and confused) was that she left office without parades and awards n’stuff.
If you think it would be higher integrity to leave it “errors and all” then I’m ok with that.
If you think I should edit to something clearer, I am happy to take your preferred wording, which expresses the idea that even some of the very best leaders rarely getting anything like a fair share of the gains they helped to create that were consumed by people they cared about as “nice things the consumers didn’t really coherently cause, but just got as a lucky benefit, due to being under the protection of a good servant leader”.
EDIT: I guess I also often think that if a person “just leaves” a role for some reason other than their term running out, then often (1) there was conflict, but (2) it is polite for everyone to pretend there wasn’t conflict, and (3) it didn’t seem like she was at the end of her term but was (4) doing a thing where she “resigned to spend more time with her family”. So my inference is that brutal power politics occurred, and I admit I did not directly observe this.
Ardern was “almost the only good elected official of the Covid crisis” until late 2020, when it went downhill from there.
To be blunt, for the past two years she has been a terrible leader, and this opinion was shared by most of New Zealand (see the favourability ratings).
Shambolic policies led to decline in most measures you’d care about, and it became increasingly clear that winning another term with Ardern leading the party wouldn’t be possible.
I guess this is to say that picking Jacinda Ardern as an example of “some of the very best leaders” is misguided, and weakens the point for anyone who is aware of the state of NZ post-2020.
International media tended to depict her favourably, but I don’t think it was due to ideological bias — she is a good speaker, a great statesperson and was excellent at depicting New Zealand internationally.
Ardern being popular or not popular does not change much about how I estimate her effects, or judge her competence. I don’t expect most New Zealand voters to judge well “from the inside” of New Zealand, any more than I expect people playing a soccer game to be motivated or calibrated on how well a referee is calling fouls within their game.
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The broad claim, above, is that “the people right now” are probably ready to see AGI through the lens of movies, and currently-applaud-as-wise policies that restrict AGI in reasonable ways, which makes such policies more feasible to enact.
Separately, I think that if (hypothetically) there are politicians who are motivated by actual care for the people and children of their country (enough to risk their career on something good-for-others) then AGI is probably such a thing, and intelligibly so to many politicians in the current zeitgeist.
Thus, I believe that if Bengio, Russell, and Yudkowsky are assessing the possibility of catalyzing good policy by thinking very clearly abut the intersection of “adequately goodness causing plans” and “politically feasible policies” they should assess the intersection as non-empty.
Since the intersection is probably non-empty, it might be worth taking the time to find, spell out in detail, and catalyze politically. That is to say: it might really be worth doing!
I think the exact opposite (though I appreciate your responses and upvoted).
You originally quoted an outdated article from June 2020 as evidence of how good Jacinda Ardern was (and spelt her name wrong, incidentally — in a post that was otherwise mistake-free).
Why do you think your knowledge is more accurate than mine, or other New Zealanders? That’s a very arrogant claim to make!
You could make the case that NZ is blinded by personality politics and dislikes Ardern on that basis, but you’d first have to make the case that Ardern was an effective leader of the country, using more than an article written only 3 months after Covid started.
Here’s a statistic:
Ardern was elected in 2018, and a major policy was Kiwibuild: build 100,000 houses by 2028 (10,000 per year).
In May 2021 (latest numbers I can find) the total built was 1,058.
It’s rumoured that most of these were bought from private developers to boost the numbers.
Were you aware of this (the lack of execution on own policies)?
What basis did you use to judge that Ardern had done an excellent job, other than running with your preconceived notions/finding evidence to confirm your current opinion?
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.
Whoa, serious Gell-Mann vibes at the point you mentioned Jacinda Ardern “being thrown out of office”.
Jacinda Ardern resigned voluntarily. At the time, her net favourability was −1%, down from a high of +32%.
Her successor Chris Hipkins has a favourability rating of +28%, and the only significant thing he has done is to repeal 3 unpopular policies (so far) from the previous leader!
I don’t follow New Zealand politics closely, but I think of Ardern as something like “almost the only good elected official of the covid crisis” and the spin I saw in US media (which I grant is often biased and confused) was that she left office without parades and awards n’stuff.
If you think it would be higher integrity to leave it “errors and all” then I’m ok with that.
If you think I should edit to something clearer, I am happy to take your preferred wording, which expresses the idea that even some of the very best leaders rarely getting anything like a fair share of the gains they helped to create that were consumed by people they cared about as “nice things the consumers didn’t really coherently cause, but just got as a lucky benefit, due to being under the protection of a good servant leader”.
EDIT: I guess I also often think that if a person “just leaves” a role for some reason other than their term running out, then often (1) there was conflict, but (2) it is polite for everyone to pretend there wasn’t conflict, and (3) it didn’t seem like she was at the end of her term but was (4) doing a thing where she “resigned to spend more time with her family”. So my inference is that brutal power politics occurred, and I admit I did not directly observe this.
Ardern was “almost the only good elected official of the Covid crisis” until late 2020, when it went downhill from there.
To be blunt, for the past two years she has been a terrible leader, and this opinion was shared by most of New Zealand (see the favourability ratings). Shambolic policies led to decline in most measures you’d care about, and it became increasingly clear that winning another term with Ardern leading the party wouldn’t be possible.
I guess this is to say that picking Jacinda Ardern as an example of “some of the very best leaders” is misguided, and weakens the point for anyone who is aware of the state of NZ post-2020.
International media tended to depict her favourably, but I don’t think it was due to ideological bias — she is a good speaker, a great statesperson and was excellent at depicting New Zealand internationally.
I think we might attach much different weight and meaning to “public sentiment”?
I wrote a long response that doesn’t really square directly with your response that included a link to selectorate theory and to a news story I found via [what did ardern do wrong] where it looks to me like a pretty normal failure mode, of winning too large an election with too many very ideologically cohesive allies, such that Ardern lost her option to personally maintain a coalition government, and was in a tactical position of having to throw too many bennies to just her own party’s ideologues? Maybe? I’m sure its more complicated than that, but that’s how it reads to me.
Ardern being popular or not popular does not change much about how I estimate her effects, or judge her competence. I don’t expect most New Zealand voters to judge well “from the inside” of New Zealand, any more than I expect people playing a soccer game to be motivated or calibrated on how well a referee is calling fouls within their game.
...
The broad claim, above, is that “the people right now” are probably ready to see AGI through the lens of movies, and currently-applaud-as-wise policies that restrict AGI in reasonable ways, which makes such policies more feasible to enact.
Separately, I think that if (hypothetically) there are politicians who are motivated by actual care for the people and children of their country (enough to risk their career on something good-for-others) then AGI is probably such a thing, and intelligibly so to many politicians in the current zeitgeist.
Thus, I believe that if Bengio, Russell, and Yudkowsky are assessing the possibility of catalyzing good policy by thinking very clearly abut the intersection of “adequately goodness causing plans” and “politically feasible policies” they should assess the intersection as non-empty.
Since the intersection is probably non-empty, it might be worth taking the time to find, spell out in detail, and catalyze politically. That is to say: it might really be worth doing!
I think the exact opposite (though I appreciate your responses and upvoted).
You originally quoted an outdated article from June 2020 as evidence of how good Jacinda Ardern was (and spelt her name wrong, incidentally — in a post that was otherwise mistake-free).
Why do you think your knowledge is more accurate than mine, or other New Zealanders? That’s a very arrogant claim to make!
You could make the case that NZ is blinded by personality politics and dislikes Ardern on that basis, but you’d first have to make the case that Ardern was an effective leader of the country, using more than an article written only 3 months after Covid started.
Here’s a statistic: Ardern was elected in 2018, and a major policy was Kiwibuild: build 100,000 houses by 2028 (10,000 per year). In May 2021 (latest numbers I can find) the total built was 1,058. It’s rumoured that most of these were bought from private developers to boost the numbers.
Were you aware of this (the lack of execution on own policies)? What basis did you use to judge that Ardern had done an excellent job, other than running with your preconceived notions/finding evidence to confirm your current opinion?
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.