# Dreaming of Political Bayescraft

Author: Zack M. Davis
Originally published: 2017-03-03
Category: social science
Tags: Bayes-structure of the universe, politics
Canonical URL: https://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/Mar/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").