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BMc2020

The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.

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I can't help but think of feynman's caltech speech about "cargo cult science" with respect to the charge of an electron.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html

The window is bifurcating. The political left and right have moved so far apart that "middle ground" ideas appeal to very few and the extremes have more viability.

Wedge issues have really split us irrationally. Group A tells scary bedtime stories to their children using caricatures of an average Group B position as a way to maintain in-group discipline.

What seems to be new now, is that Group B has taken to espousing Group A's caricature as a way of proving their group identity. "Group A says we eat babies. I eat more babies than anyone else, proving my Group B bonafides!" If you want to stand out in the primaries, you can't be a competent, coalition-building centrist. You gotta eat more babies than the next guy.

Current political system reinforces extremism. I'm of the camp that believes we urgently need incremental reforms like Ranked Choice Voting and open primaries. It doesn't solve everything, but it's the reform we can do that gives us the most mileage today.

First time I've heard this, great point. (The baby eating thing, not ranked choice voting)

I think extremism is a sign things are bad, but haven't gotten worse. Like, normal communication has broken down, but nothing has escalated to the really scary place where everyone shuts up.

Falling off a cliff isn't so bad, it's the impact with the ground that we should worry about.

Although FPTP is bad, it's not at all clear that IRV (the election method that most mean when they say the ballot-marking method of RCV) actually leads to less extremism. It's a chaos monkey in any race that approaches competitive, and changes that one might expect to help A (such as more A > B > C votes) can actually hurt A. That is, its bad results show up precisely when it might produce a different outcome than FPTP. See the recent Alaska house election for an actual case.

If you're tied to a full ranking, there are much better choices than IRV; any of the Condorcet methods, for instance. However, rating systems are far more likely to produce compromise candidates. I like Approval, perhaps with a runoff between the top 2.

EDITTED-TO-ADD: In practice IRV and FPTP both suffer from the "center-squeeze effect": https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...

Would you mind explaining more about what you mean regarding the recent Alaska election? The information I have found about it made it seem fairly reasonable and straightforward to me, but perhaps I am missing something.

Here's a decent commentary:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska...

> Two popular suspicions are now confirmed. Nick Begich was the Condorcet winner. Sarah Palin was a spoiler candidate - her presence caused Mary Peltola to be elected, by prematurely eliminating Nick Begich.

Here's another, that got down-voted to hell, because of the audience.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ForwardPartyUSA/comments/xb119e/its...

> If 2913 voters who supported Palin first and Begich second flipped their first and second preferences, they’d have gotten a more preferred result.

(i.e. they would have gotten Begich instead of Peltola, by having Palin eliminated first)

> Even worse, if instead 5825 of those same types of voters just decided not to vote, they’d have also gotten a better result. So merely participating in the election hurt them.

While I do prefer the winner it selected, it's not a great election method. Better than FPTP is a terribly low bar.

I see, that was helpful - thank you!

Condorcet has arguably worse features:

1. Even harder to explain to the average voter than RCV

2. Greater likelihood of nobody winning / needing to conduct new election

I am of the belief that RCV is not great, but that it is significantly better than status quo... and it is possible.

For 1, meh. Marking is the same and it is much closer to incentivizing honest reporting. For 2, everyone advocating for Condorcet has some favorite cycle-breaker. Mostly it doesn't matter; it's a lot more rare than non-monotonicity in IRV.

But my favorite is approval.

IIUC how it would've worked in Australia is:

First round:

Begic and Peltola garner the most first-place votes, Palin is eliminated.

Voters who ranked Palin first get their second choice promoted to first. Presumably that would be Begic for most voters.

Second round:

Begic first choice votes + Palin > Begic votes vs. Peltola votes

Looking at the data in the reddit vote breakdown thread it looks like Begic would've won with this method.

I don't know if they're exactly following the Australian STV rules, but it is quite similar.

Begich had the fewest amount of _first_ place votes, so was eliminated first.

However, Begich was ranked ahead of Palin (and Pelota for that matter) on more ballots than vice-versa.

> Begich had the fewest amount of _first_ place votes, so was eliminated first.

Ah, I misunderstood that part. Under Australian rules voters who ranked Begich first would have had their second choices promoted to first and added to the respective candidates. In this case ~27k for Palin and ~15.5k for Peltola. Then the totals are compared.

Looking at it that way it's not so clear cut that it was unfair that Peltola was declared the winner. I think reasonable arguments can be made either way.

One thing though is that on Australian ballots all candidates must be ranked.

> Under Australian rules voters who ranked Begich first would have had their second choices promoted to first and added to the respective candidates. In this case ~27k for Palin and ~15.5k for Peltola. Then the totals are compared.

Exactly what happened. Palin was a spoiler -- had she not run, Begich would ha e won instead.

> One thing though is that on Australian ballots all candidates must be ranked.

That's kind of ridiculous. It's quite unwieldy and leads to many spoiled ballots. And I don't think forcing ordering past the point of caring really changes anything.

There basically is no political left to speak of and there hasn’t been one for decades. There is a bifurcation, but it’s largely a drift between a broadly rightward shift across political mainstreams on the one hand, and an increasingly contentious concept of who is allowed to exist and to what extent they can exist unperturbed.

The downvotes without refutation are a pity.

The Left is effectively absorbed by civil liberty issues (LGBQT+, abortion, and immigration come to mind). Those issues are worthy of support but they're pathetically easy to demonize by the Right.

And there's the fact that Trump broken countless political norms so the Left is still stuck in "the old ways" and has effectively brought a knife to a gun fight.

Since America hasn't had a political left in... let's say 50 years. What's an example of a middle ground idea that doesn't appeal anymore?

I would say that any sense of sane immigration reform is completely unrealistic right now.

By "sane" I specifically mean "acknowledges the shortcomings of the current system, at the same time as we acknowledge our dependence on foreign labor"

Also worth mentioning that the window doesn't have a set direction in the short term. It can move back and forth, expand, and shrink fairly arbitrarily. It also largely depends on the spectrum parameters specified.

I don't believe in it as a concrete, measureable thing; I do believe in it as a signal for disposition over time.

Over the long term, though, it moves left. Opinions in 1800 were far further right than far-right of today.

It’s one reason the old tend to be conservative. They were born at a fixed slice of the Overton window, which moved left, carrying them right.

> Over the long term, though, it moves left. Opinions in 1800 were far further right than far-right of today.

1800 is a weird baseline to pick, but even so I’m skeptical.

1900 works too. I was omitting an explicit mention of slavery, but a woman’s right to vote might be a better base.

1900 is even weirder to be honest. The shorter your time scale the more debatable the shift. Since 1800, despite abolition of chattel slavery, slavery has been constitutionally protected as punishment for crimes and along with it came the carceral state. Since 1900 there have been many voting rights expansions, and a continuous program not just to curtail voting rights but to undermine the concept of the validity of elections themselves.

On a short enough scale, the trend line is probably what we’d call “leftward” today. But on a longer scale I don’t think that’s the case. Not that Marx would approve of this appropriation of his analysis (because it wouldn’t support his theory of progress either), but it was a “primitive communism” which came before feudalism and eventually capitalism.

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