Dreaming of Political Bayescraft

My old political philosophy: "Socially liberal, fiscally confused; I don't know how to run a goddamned country (and neither do you)."

Commentary: Pretty good, but not quite meta enough.

My new political philosophy: "Being smart is more important than being good (for humans). All ideologies are false; some are useful."

Commentary: Social design space is very large and very high-dimensional; the forces of memetic evolution are somewhat benevolent (all ideas that you've heard of have to be genuinely appealing to some feature of human psychology, or no one would have an incentive to tell you about them), but really smart people who know lots of science and lots of probability and game theory might be able to do better for themselves! 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! This stance is itself, technically, loyalty to an idea, but hopefully it's a sufficiently meta idea to avoid running into the standard traps while also being sufficiently object-level to have easily-discoverable decision-relevant implications and not run afoul of the principle of ultrafinite recursion ("all infinite recursions are at most three levels deep").

3 thoughts on “Dreaming of Political Bayescraft

  1. Maybe I'm being obtuse but could you give me a couple of hypothetical examples of what switching loyalties to a psychological feature would look like?

  2. > Being smart is more important than being good (for humans).

    Scary wrong. Smart and good are multiplicative factors. The most important one is whichever you can improve by a higher percentage.

  3. Your new philosophy sounds not too dissimilar to my current perspective: politics is actively dangerous due to corrupting forces and if your power level doesn't allow you to shield yourself you should stay the hell away, but even then proceed with caution. I think too much emphasis on being smart is dangerous; best description of this that I know of is in the introduction to Impro where Keith Johnstone tries to explain how valuing cleverness for its own sake can be very bad for creativity.

    > Smart and good are multiplicative factors. The most important one is whichever you can improve by a higher percentage.

    Insufficient smart can lead to only running in the wrong direction. Goodness doesn't actually look like a fundamental dimension. The world is probably best understood as good and spambots.

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