I think that there is a place for basic research here. By that I mean, research which, as much as possible, is motivated by fundamental bottlenecks, not by practical ones. Such research already exists in a tension between the specific and the abstract, and getting too abstract is one failure mode. My way of handling that tension is to metaphorically keep my feet on solid ground even as my eyes are on the horizon, and the specific immediate problems are that solid ground.
This is not to say that it is not good to look at the problem from the transhumanist angle, too. And in the countless hours I spend thinking about this stuff, a few of them point in that direction, even if I don’t write it all here. But I think that even if your primary focus is the transhumanist angle, you should be happy that I’m over here looking at the problem mostly from a different angle.
(“Your” there was directed to a generic/abstract reader, not specifically to Raemon.)
OpenPhil supported the Center for Election Science once, but they’re much more a political action group than a voting theory research group. They primarily do ballot initiatives and public education on what we already know.
If enacting your policies is the real bottleneck, then it makes sense that 90% of your argument is true, but it still doesn’t matter because you can’t enact political change.
I don’t know if I believe that, but it’s imaginable.
EDIT: After seeing that you know way more about this than I do, I’ll leave my thought here, but definitely defer to you.
I think that there is a place for basic research here. By that I mean, research which, as much as possible, is motivated by fundamental bottlenecks, not by practical ones. Such research already exists in a tension between the specific and the abstract, and getting too abstract is one failure mode. My way of handling that tension is to metaphorically keep my feet on solid ground even as my eyes are on the horizon, and the specific immediate problems are that solid ground.
This is not to say that it is not good to look at the problem from the transhumanist angle, too. And in the countless hours I spend thinking about this stuff, a few of them point in that direction, even if I don’t write it all here. But I think that even if your primary focus is the transhumanist angle, you should be happy that I’m over here looking at the problem mostly from a different angle.
(“Your” there was directed to a generic/abstract reader, not specifically to Raemon.)
OpenPhil supported the Center for Election Science once, but they’re much more a political action group than a voting theory research group. They primarily do ballot initiatives and public education on what we already know.
If enacting your policies is the real bottleneck, then it makes sense that 90% of your argument is true, but it still doesn’t matter because you can’t enact political change.
I don’t know if I believe that, but it’s imaginable.
EDIT: After seeing that you know way more about this than I do, I’ll leave my thought here, but definitely defer to you.