Bureaucrat. Penguin enthusiast.
JohnofCharleston
Karma: 284
Agree with both the OP and Habryka’s pitch. The Meetup Organizers Retreat hosted at Lighthaven in 2022 was a huge inflection point for my personal involvement with the community.
My conflict got bumped to next week, so I’ll make it after all. Have a large strawberry cheesecake to give for the cause.
there’s likely a kind of “position warfare” going on in policy circles to make sure your position is the one that’s primed to win if the conditions for its enactment are suddenly met
I’m not sure how much “position warfare” happens for all but the most predictable events. After policy surprises there’s usually a big fight to claim credit for predicting the crisis and a mandate for what to do about it. People and organizations certainly prepare for that (and I think our community should prepare more), but it’s more by making predictions, finding allies, refining arguments, and writing plans.
A shocking event led to the dominance of a political faction that previously had just been one of several competing factions, because that faction’s basic vibe (that we should make use of American hegemony, and that rogue states are a threat to national security) was roughly supported by the event.
The response was substantially driven by elite judgements rather than popular judgement.
I think this is entirely correct. The Iraq War is one of the best examples of outside-the-Overton-Window policy change in recent memory.
In my understanding, the key trigger for the “Milton Friedman Model of Policy Change” is the Policy Community being surprised. At its core, the Overton Window is a set of norms enforced by this community. In the wake of crisis those norms aren’t enforced, so rather than shifting in some linear way, the window is temporarily suspended. Then, as Friedman said, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Thalidomide is another great example of when the policy change in the wake of a crisis has little to do with the trigger other than a particular faction winning the narrative fight.
I’ve been meaning to write more about this, would any particular angles be helpful?
I’m glad Jenn came to town and helped fix this policy proposal. I think her claim to 1-3% credit is an underestimate. I’m grateful for the first-hand account of how to fix policy that will not have the effects that the issuing body intends. Sometimes the best “technical correction” to a bad policy proposal is just start over.
The DC Policy Community is smaller than most people think. It’s smaller than many people who are in it think. This miscalibration causes problems. There’s a fundamental tension between performing your role to the best of your ability and taking on responsibility for the whole outcome. I think that tension, fiat justitia ruat caelum vs heroic responsibility, is key to understanding the bureaucratic soul. But that will need to be its own post someday.
Millions of people are employed in industries that export. The flaw in this policy proposal was easy to understand using only publicly-accessible data. Wikipedia gets you most of the way there. How is it possible that one small non-profit was the only organization to officially point out this basic flaw?
Jenn’s explanation is great and entirely correct, but I’d like to highlight one of the drivers: something like the bystander effect. Balsa was not the only group to notice this problem. Everyone knew that this problem was easy to spot, knew that it must have been easy for the authors of the policy to spot it. But pointing it out has costs, risking the relationship if you’re right, looking dumb if there’s something you missed. Once the obvious error is pointed out in the record, even once, that should be enough to prevent the worst version of the rule from going into effect (by threat of an Administrative Procedures Act action, if nothing else). So if the pool of public commenters is large, and you’re a prominent-but-not-overly-powerful group that has higher-priority problems on your plate, it’s entirely rational to want someone else to bear the cost of pointing out the problem.
The problem comes if you’re miscalibrated about how big the policy community is. If you expect an action to get thousands of well-informed public comments, it’s probably safe to assume most such flaws will be pointed out. If the action only gets 586 comments in total, and most of those are focused on a more headline-grabbing aspect of the proposal, that assumption is no longer safe.
There are hints of this in the record. The National Retail Federation’s analysis implies there were back-channel communications. Their written testimony makes clear that they spotted the problem, yet chose not to mention it directly. “Surely someone else will point out this problem so we don’t have to...”
This story has a moral: Do not assume what is obvious to you is obvious to the DC Policy Community. Even if you’re right and the issue is obvious, you might still be the only person to speak up about the issue.
Not on my screen, not for the line breaks at least. See here:
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/balsa-update-springtime-in-dc
Though you’re right, the footnotes aren’t links in the substack version either.
(Formatting Note: line breaks and footnotes got broken in the cross-post)
Note this event says June 27th. Was this intended? Thought I was RSVPing to one this coming Friday, June 20th
It’s certainly plausible that you’re right, but I worry about this a lot more now after the supply chain disruptions from Covid and tarrifs. I worry that we’d have real cold-start bottlenecks that would take years to resolve, not weeks or months, in any scenario where we lose access to Chinese parts. Scenarios in which ocean shipping is substantially disrupted are even scarier in one sense, though China would probably be symmetricaly affected, or worse.
The best counter-argument to my worry, and biggest update I’ve had on this in recent years, is the success of the TSMC chip fab in Arizona. I predicted it would not go well. I’m delighted to have been wrong.
Defense technology production is no longer about manufacturing. It’s culturally artisanal. In peer competition, the ability to scale is typically more decisive than artisinal quality (with the notable exception of the Manhattan project).
I think you’re right that American drones would likely be several times better, perhaps an order of magnitude better, than Chinese comparators. But we would have substantial bottlenecks on scaling production, could not simply resolve those bottlenecks with money, and even if we manage to scale appropriately would face huge cost disadvantages.
That’s a huge problem when the use case is swarm tactics. China could probably afford a strategy to saturate defenses with its drones, we probably could not, with our current mindset and processes.
Back at home now, this album is excellent at summoning the particular mood blending intensity, playfulness, and weltschmerz[1] that Lighthaven consistently instills in me.
Note: “You Have Not Been A Good User” seems to be missing, with 7 seconds of silence as a placeholder.
I didn’t listen closely to the lyrics two weeks ago, but I’m finding time now. “Friendly Fire” is particularly affecting. I don’t see a co-author listed, no obvious hits on the language. Was that you? How are you doing?
- ^
Claude’s helpful suggestion for “word for ennui + dread + hopelessness + obligation + duty”
- ^
Is Republican opposition to AI Regulation “lasting”? I notice there’s some movement this week on AI Whistleblower Protection from Congressional Republicans.
My read of the situation is that Republicans largely oppose whatever Biden supported, but weakly. That opposition can and has been overcome in several policy areas. Trump repealed the Biden AI Executive Order, and JD Vance gave a critical speech at the Paris Conference, but I wouldn’t assume their opposition is lasting or categorical.
I’d be very interested to read a post on this, though! If you have more thoughts on how sticky their opposition is, please write them up.
This marginal analysis is correct on its own terms, but I think is irrelevant to Jason’s point.
To escape American Federal or Californian regulation, a company would have to stop doing business in the relevant jurisdiction, not just shift marginal investment in new data centers. My understanding of Jason’s point is that the AI companies are willing to pay large costs already to stay where they are. Sure, there might be a tipping point where companies start leaving the Bay, which is a distinct risk of strong Californian regulation. But it seems implausible that any of the relevant companies would stop selling services to Americans.
Earning the Chance to Persuade
It’s not enough to just articulate a good idea and provide evidence that it’s good; you also have to do quite a bit of political advertising.
I’m glad Jason is explaining his theory of change in such detail. His points that governance ideas won’t spread automatically, and that we have to earn credibility for pitches to get traction, seem obvious in retrospect. But despite thinking about this topic quite a lot the past six months, I hadn’t fully incorporated this into my model.
In my one LW post to-date, I explained Milton Friedman’s theory of policy change, that “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change”. While I don’t think that’s the only way policy can significantly change, I believe it’s the main way that outside the Overton Window policy ideas become possible. To effectively use this theory, a community need only: make novel, accurate, and unpopular predictions about future political shocks, have a coherent model of the world that explains that shock, and at a crucial moment hand a binder to surprised and confused policymakers. If all goes well, they’ll be grateful for the suggestions and good policy ideas will promptly sail through Congress and rule-making agencies. That’s just three things, easy.
Coca-Cola famously spends massive amounts on advertising, but very little of it has an immediate, measurable impact. Coca-Cola doesn’t typically ask you to click on banner ads, to sign up for a subscription service, or to CALL NOW. Their advertising is trying to make sure that when you’re thirsty, later, you remember their brand, have positive associations, and will prefer their products over similar alternatives. This is basic Brand Awareness Advertising, and it works well when you can credibly predict that a decision will need to be made at some point, but not necessarily when, where, or the precise scenario in which it will be made.
Jason makes an excellent point, that should have been obvious, that when the next policy window opens, this community won’t be the only one claiming credit for the prediction. This community won’t be the only one offering a binder of policy fixes to confused and grateful policymakers. We need to do much more to prepare for that eventuality.
Brought my car to the office, hopefully there by 6.
I’m going and looking forward to it!
Believe this time is wrong, should be Noon EST per the ACX post:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024
Thank you for the update. I passed this listing on with my endorsement to several people in the DC community who applied and heard nothing back. Having the event fall through like this is discouraging.
In the future I’d urge you to share bad news sooner, it doesn’t get better with time.
As a counter-argument, Dominic Cummings’s argument that it is ~impossible to reform bureaucracies. The only plausible path to improvement is replacing moribund institutions with new startups, explicitly with different institutional cultures.
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/regime-change-2-a-plea-to-siliconNot endorsed, but worth grappling with.
I think this is a great idea that would serve an urgent need. I’d urge to you do it in the near future.