I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
> then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
I think the problem that Waterluvian's is getting at is precisely that WYSIWYG politics is taken as the preferred choice without understanding the implications that make it not actually work. For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
> If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
If the quality of those two goes up, hopefully people start employing second-order thinking and beyond and realize that WYSIWYG politics may not be what it seems to be at the surface level.
> For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
Passing a censorship/surveillance bill using the pretext of protecting children is the opposite of WYSIWYG. The true motive is building an apparatus to use to enforce other authoritarian policies and protecting children is the Trojan horse.
If people were better informed about second order effects then that wouldn't work because they would see through the consequences when a pretext is being presented for a bad idea, and then the politicians who attempt it would be more often punished than rewarded. The tactic of lying to people would happen less often because it would be selected against when the number of people who see through you is enough to boot you out of office.
Have you checked the premise? Usually the waves of fake protect-the-children policies are widely decried, support is fairly thin and the politicians pass it anyway then refuse to revisit the issue ever.
It is like the constant aggressive warfare the US is in - the US public clearly loathes it. Every single election they seem to vote for the candidate most vocally promising peace. I don't think it would be fair to say that the people keep accepting it, the dynamic is clearly that the political class refuses to acknowledge the hint.
I think support can be quiet. I think politicians make a bet on how their constituents, including the quiet ones, will feel.
Do you think that on average if you pulled a person off the street and asked them, they'd evaluate such policies as bad? I think seeing e.g. the awfulness of compromising encryption and device ownership requires at least a tech background, which most wouldn't have. Most would probably just think, "with this, there should be less reason to worry just leaving my child to their devices".
If your position is that the average person on the street thinks a policy is a good idea then the politicians involved aren't going to need complex signalling. They're going to say "You all like this policy! The current mob aren't going to do it >:( Vote for me, I will implement it". The sticking point is all the policies politicians implement that are unpopular with the average person on the street and that polie couldn't win an election if they were visibly standing for their actual position.
The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Absolutely. Bread and circuses isn't a new idea.
>The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Points for the doing good in the end. But it's a rule in hell/serve in heaven issue, if you first need to create hell with your quest for power you have failed the objective of doing good in the end.
Evil can act Good, but Good cannot act Evil. Evil has that advantage over Good that cannot be matched.
This continuously plays out in our political systems. Good actors cannot fight the deluge of evil of their opponents, who are free to lie cheat and steal.
Good binds its own hands. For good to win, it must act with even greater evil. At which point, it becomes the very thing that it tried to defeat.
Rarely a great RPG forces my good party to make difficult decisions.
> For a variety of reasons, we no longer cultivate long term familial bonds or friendships, employment, or even product purchases. If you ask me, the world has increasingly become a series of short games that are being exploited by bad actors, and the result is an epic rise in distrust of just about everything and everyone.
The assumption here is that being Evil is advantageous. It's obviously advantageous to personal gain, but the relevant thing is whether it's advantageous to staying in power, and then the system you want to design is the one where it isn't.
Notice also that it isn't binary. You can make it harder to be Evil and then have less of it even if you never have none.
The most confident I ever was that I was "obviously correct" was when I was 20.
Also, it's not about not being able to see any bad, but some things that obviously seemed correct, stop seeming so obvious.
Reminds me of that clip where a man in some TV show gets slapped by the woman host and he slaps her back. Then a bunch of men from the audience come to beat him up. It's one thing to have the moral "never hit a woman" and "protect women", but if women abuse these views to mistreat and humiliate others without consequence, that doesn't seem right either.
It doesn't seem right for the men to have beat him up for defending himself. They thought they were being moral, but they weren't.
Sometimes moral views can require nuance.
On the other hand, physical abuse of women by men is much more common and dangerous, and there's a utilitarian argument that society should treat it more harshly. Not saying the guys beating up the other guy were moral, but it's easy to argue they were closer.
Now for all we know the woman was physically stronger than the man in the instance you're speaking of (doubtful) and hitting her back wasn't that big a deal or even deserved. But as a societal norm we should be dissuading men from hitting women even if they're hit first otherwise you might often get a major injury in exchange for a minor sting. And it's a FAFO situation when you break these norms.
But I find it hard to see the nuance in much of the political nonsense going on right now (which is what I thought you were speaking of). Mass surveillance that doesn't seem to offer any security in return? Obviously bad. Things like measles, the screwworm, and cyclospora coming back due to political posturing or just plain ignorance? Obviously bad. Again I don't see how you could possibly be on the fence about a lot of the politics going on right now unless it's benefiting you in some way.
Not all politics mind you, I'm sure you can find some nuggets of good in there somewhere too. But if you're having a tough time determining the bad things currently as prices for everything are rising and the world is in constant turmoil I want whatever drugs you're taking.
“Unions can be corrupt” or “You don’t need unions to get your voice heard” is the kind of rhetoric that leads to disinterest in unions over the years.
> The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy.
Empathy, yes. Simplicity doesn't normally lead to empathy; complexity does.
In my experience, the left tends to like simple stories ("we are poor and the capitalists are rich, so just take their money and give it to us", "if people love each other, they should be able to marry, no matter the gender"). The right tends to like complex explanations ("taking money from the rich destroys the incentive structure required for effective resource allocation", "gay marriage makes gay people happy, but destroy the Christian values on which the western society was build, and therefore may have unpredictable consequences").
Neither approach is right or wrong. The left tends to oversimplify and prioritize surface compassion above all else (the communism case), but sometimes the simple argument really is the right argument (the gay marriage case). The right tries to show off how smart and sophisticated their arguments are, and how "it's not that simple". Sometimes they get it right (such as in the communism case), but they very often try to find a "but actually" explanation where one is not warranted (the gay marriage case).
A leftist can equally say that a rightist likes simple stories ("if the poor want to be rich, they should just apply themselves", "less developed countries are such because their race (DNA) results in inferior IQ"). The left tends to like complex explanations ("we don't live in a perfect meritocracy for one to just apply themselves. There's various complex societal issues preventing that stemming from racism, sexism, inherited trauma, classism, differing values from working-class cultures, etc. Some of it can be seen as maybe unintended but real covert oppression by the upper classes, which leads to a sense of societal responsibility instead of just simple surface compassion.", "Countries may be less developed because of a plethora of reasons, including historical events that lead to different issues and compounding effects, cultures that value other things over those that lead to personal economic growth (e.g. people that couldn't imagine leaving their aging parents to care for themselves or be left with strangers instead of personally becoming their caregivers), etc. Intelligence doesn't exist on a one-dimensional spectrum as measured by IQ. IQ itself probably doesn't only depend on DNA. It's possible your environment and personal history also influence it. If the belief comes from statistical reports on the average IQ by country, it's also possible it's due to brain drain from emigration.")
"Capital" is a big honking book. It has substantially more to it than "take their money and give it to us," and contemporary leftist thought has a huge number of different intellectual takes on how to right the world, from syndicalism to libertarian socialism, and the debates are vigorous (sometimes too vigorous, if you ask me).
I could just as easily characterize (eg) the Christian right as fundamentally only making one argument: "God wants it to be this way." That would be dumb. I've read CS Lewis and Chesterton, Ivan Illich. I happen to think that, fundamentally, there isn't anything like the Christian god out there, but I can see that its not just as simple as the cartoon I sketched above.
Racism never was (and still isn’t) simple. There were entire scientific fields developed to justify racial hierarchy. Nazism was similar.
> you cannot make that argument without backing it with a bunch of convoluted nonsense (complexity).
Unfortunately, the one listening is the one that determines how much complexity you need. Some people are convinced more easily than others. In the end, people tend to believe what they want.
Agreed. My point about complexity vs. simplicity does not apply to people who are coming in with strong, preconceived notions. Because how would a simple argument convince them of a generalization otherwise?
Expanding on this, the point I was making is that Complexity is dangerous for those who are genuinely interested in trying to understand a topic or are simply on the fence. Just muddy the water until they lose interest and you’re golden.
The antidote to that is simplicity and empathy: start with the core issue and frame it in terms the audience will empathize with. In fact, I think this is also how you deal with the aforementioned group who are easy to fall into the trap of oversimplification; you just have to find a way to simplify things differently :)
If it covers enough ground and they're prone to lose interest with more complex explanations, that can convince them... They can justify it with Occam's razor.
You're talking about coming in with strong, preconceived notions, but I think those notions start with simplistic race/DNA explanations. It's precisely because the explanation is simple that it's appealing. Even just pointing at the pattern may suffice.
Peer Cyph0n is on the ball, save in the instances of the rarer and more extreme terminally corrupt unions - and even those mostly hold worker safety dear (albeit little else).
This is an extremely dangerous idea without being counterbalanced by fact that reality is often complex and good actors want to be honest about it.
Bad actors desire confusion is closer to being accurate. But bad actors also often oversimplify to rouse people to some politically beneficial but ultimately harmful action.
I think highly-educated people have a tendency to overestimate their expertise outside of their field, and especially in different subfields of the field they're expert in. Many (though certainly not all) low-IQ people tend to delegate to experts; although they often don't know enough to choose the right ones.
Look at HN politics. It's still the same as other kinds of politics, just with the issues swapped. We exchange "they're trying to take away our guns" for "they're trying to take away our root access", with basically the same arguments.
Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)
Entropy. Things will dissolve enough that eventually someone will make changes. It takes a long time though, this is likely a feature.