Upvoted both for the helpful summary of considerations, as well as for (I think) following a pretty good algorithm (making a good faith effort to assess something important to your identity)
My current take is something like:
One one hand, in the end, I expect you’ll do the thing that your brain is naturally curious about and the justifications are mostly post-hoc. And that’s probably fine and I wouldn’t stress too much about it. I think a lot of good progress comes by people incrementally following their curiosities, and fighting against your natural curiosities doesn’t seem very practical for intellectual work.
But, insofar as your interests are malleable, I think it’d be worth asking more specific questions for each of the plausible ways voting-theory-might matter.
If the goal is “improve elections, largely because of their second-order effects”, then I’d ask what sort of progress is most bottlenecking that. (The answer may be more political than theoretical, and you may or may not be interested in doing political/activism work. But even narrowing the scope to theoretical progress, my guess is that problems vary in how relevant they are to the “get concrete reform passed for government elections”)
If the goal is “figure out how optimal decisionmaking should be made in the transhumanist future, or in CEV”, I’m guessing that the theoretical bottlenecks there are different for the nearterm election reform.
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.
Upvoted both for the helpful summary of considerations, as well as for (I think) following a pretty good algorithm (making a good faith effort to assess something important to your identity)
My current take is something like:
One one hand, in the end, I expect you’ll do the thing that your brain is naturally curious about and the justifications are mostly post-hoc. And that’s probably fine and I wouldn’t stress too much about it. I think a lot of good progress comes by people incrementally following their curiosities, and fighting against your natural curiosities doesn’t seem very practical for intellectual work.
But, insofar as your interests are malleable, I think it’d be worth asking more specific questions for each of the plausible ways voting-theory-might matter.
If the goal is “improve elections, largely because of their second-order effects”, then I’d ask what sort of progress is most bottlenecking that. (The answer may be more political than theoretical, and you may or may not be interested in doing political/activism work. But even narrowing the scope to theoretical progress, my guess is that problems vary in how relevant they are to the “get concrete reform passed for government elections”)
If the goal is “figure out how optimal decisionmaking should be made in the transhumanist future, or in CEV”, I’m guessing that the theoretical bottlenecks there are different for the nearterm election reform.
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.