Any time you find yourself being tempted to be loyal to an idea, it turns out that what you should actually be loyal to is whatever underlying feature of human psychology makes the idea look like a good idea; that way, you’ll find it easier to fucking update when it turns out that the implementation of your favorite idea isn’t as fun as you expected!
I agree that this is a step in the right direction, but I want to elaborate why I think this is hard.
It is my impression that many utopians stay loyal to their chosen tactics that are supposed to closen the utopia even after the efficiency of the those tactics come into question. My hypothesis for why such thing can happen is that, typically, the tactics are relatively concrete whereas goals they are supposed to achieve are usually quite vague (e.g. “greater good”). Thus when goals and tactics conflict the person who tries to reconcile them will find it easier to modify the goals than the tactics, perhaps without even noticing that the new goals may be slightly different from the old goals, since due to vagueness the old goals and the new goals overlap so much. Over time, goals may drift into becoming quite different from the starting point. At the same time, since tactics are more concrete it is easier to notice changes in them.
I suspect that in your case we might observe something similar, since it is often quite hard to pinpoint exactly what underlying features of human psychology make a certain idea compelling.
really smart people who know lots of science and lots of probability and game theory might be able to do better for themselves
I agree that science, probability and game theory put constraints on how hard problems of politics could be solved. Nevertheless, I suspect that those constraints, coupled with vagueness of our desires, may turn out to be lax enough to allow many different answers for most problems. In this case this idea would help to weed out a lot of bad ideas, but it may not be enough to choose among those the rest. In another case, those constraints may turn out to be too restrictive to satisfy a lot of desires people find compelling. Then we would get some kind of impossibility theorem and the question which requirements to relax and what imperfections to tolerate.
I agree that this is a step in the right direction, but I want to elaborate why I think this is hard.
It is my impression that many utopians stay loyal to their chosen tactics that are supposed to closen the utopia even after the efficiency of the those tactics come into question. My hypothesis for why such thing can happen is that, typically, the tactics are relatively concrete whereas goals they are supposed to achieve are usually quite vague (e.g. “greater good”). Thus when goals and tactics conflict the person who tries to reconcile them will find it easier to modify the goals than the tactics, perhaps without even noticing that the new goals may be slightly different from the old goals, since due to vagueness the old goals and the new goals overlap so much. Over time, goals may drift into becoming quite different from the starting point. At the same time, since tactics are more concrete it is easier to notice changes in them.
I suspect that in your case we might observe something similar, since it is often quite hard to pinpoint exactly what underlying features of human psychology make a certain idea compelling.
I agree that science, probability and game theory put constraints on how hard problems of politics could be solved. Nevertheless, I suspect that those constraints, coupled with vagueness of our desires, may turn out to be lax enough to allow many different answers for most problems. In this case this idea would help to weed out a lot of bad ideas, but it may not be enough to choose among those the rest. In another case, those constraints may turn out to be too restrictive to satisfy a lot of desires people find compelling. Then we would get some kind of impossibility theorem and the question which requirements to relax and what imperfections to tolerate.