In some worlds / topics / countries this would be a really good point. But we have 50 years of Nobel Prize winning economics (“public choice”) and empirical evidence showing that large democracies are not at all “machines for passing good policies”. So in the US, the benefits of a policy proposal are, unfortunately, almost irrelevant. We have essentially infinite lists of suggestions for better policies; adding more does basically nothing. The entirety of the problem is the construction of the law-making machine; and so to me, your suggestion in that sphere is that we deny the only thing that matters: the sausage-making machine.
Now, in other spheres, this is (fortunately) not the case. For example, in the part of EA that’s about “how to do the most good”, not about “how to grow the EA movement”, there is the potential for a good suggestion to get seen by a decision-maker and adopted. Having more content-based discussions makes a lot of sense there. Or, with a trusted friend. Or, in a well-run company. Or even in a small democracy where public opinion on beneficial policies actually sometimes translates to those policies being passed.
If you want to produce good outcomes from nations, learn fields like public choice, or law & econ, and then influence activists to choose more informed strategies. (For example, I choose to work on charter cities for this reason). Otherwise you’re acting within an idealized system that doesn’t match reality in a way such that your strategies are basically useless. Your personal experience of being convinced by object-level examples to change your politics just don’t translate to the behavior of a 350M person democracy.
In some worlds / topics / countries this would be a really good point. But we have 50 years of Nobel Prize winning economics (“public choice”) and empirical evidence showing that large democracies are not at all “machines for passing good policies”. So in the US, the benefits of a policy proposal are, unfortunately, almost irrelevant. We have essentially infinite lists of suggestions for better policies; adding more does basically nothing. The entirety of the problem is the construction of the law-making machine; and so to me, your suggestion in that sphere is that we deny the only thing that matters: the sausage-making machine.
Now, in other spheres, this is (fortunately) not the case. For example, in the part of EA that’s about “how to do the most good”, not about “how to grow the EA movement”, there is the potential for a good suggestion to get seen by a decision-maker and adopted. Having more content-based discussions makes a lot of sense there. Or, with a trusted friend. Or, in a well-run company. Or even in a small democracy where public opinion on beneficial policies actually sometimes translates to those policies being passed.
If you want to produce good outcomes from nations, learn fields like public choice, or law & econ, and then influence activists to choose more informed strategies. (For example, I choose to work on charter cities for this reason). Otherwise you’re acting within an idealized system that doesn’t match reality in a way such that your strategies are basically useless. Your personal experience of being convinced by object-level examples to change your politics just don’t translate to the behavior of a 350M person democracy.