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We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

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Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#71

Post by psd1 »

energy123 wrote: post #19
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralization is an information problem. You can't make good centralized decisions if you don't have good information to base this on. China still has this problem; the data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality. But it has the problem to a much lesser degree than the USSR, because surveillance technology and data management are improving.

This is called the Local Knowledge Problem. It's why centralization can't work and has never worked, at least not until we have some ASI they can overcome it.

I think you are directionally correct, but too strong. South Korea ran a protectionist command economy for decades with great success. Clearly it can work. China is now a superpower. Clearly it can work.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#72

Post by deepsummer »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #36

Governments do run experiments sometimes, quite a lot of experiments on UBI have been run for example and we have good knowledge on whether its introduction would improve society. But I don't feel like leadership particularly cares about evidence and the right thing, they are far more idealogical than that and tend to gravitate towards policy based evidence from thinktanks and other powerful sources that produce bad…

I think the UBI experiments were one-sided. They may have proven that the receivers have profited. But did they show that the givers profited as well, or at least did not suffer enough to significantly reduce their economic output and therefore risk the financing of UBI?

You'd need to check something like take a group of high-earners, increase their tax rate by say 100%, increase their cost of living, and validate that they neither leave the experiment nor work significantly less.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#73

Post by duskdozer »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #9
V__ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 15min cities are Soros funded projects to imprison us and the sheeple don't understandit. Renewable energy is a "gina" scam to destroy our economy. Healthcare is communism, socialism, fascism. Everything sucks but I don't want anything to change... /s If a society makes every problem a culture war, there can't be any progress until it gets so bad it can't be ignored anymore. But I feel even that is bit too op…

One of the fundamental issues is that some people so strongly tie their identity to a party that an idea can by definition not be good if the other side supports it. It's not a project to improve society, it's a game, a war, and the other side is evil and must be defeated.

This may be true in some cases, but when you have a system that entrenches two major parties, you don't get to vote for idea X, you have to vote for party A or party B. If you have some policies that are dealbreakers, and party A agrees with you and party B doesn't, you can't vote for party B even if they support idea X. So then you become a supposed "party B fanboy"

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#74

Post by psd1 »

panick21_ wrote: post #30
eimrine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is more important for you - economy or ecology?

Trains, walking, bikes, solar or nuclear plants are all good for both. Smart policies like land value tax are good for both. Tons and tons of things are good for both. In general economy is more important because people, but people also live in the environment. But not building a mine because of tailings is a bit silly as it just mean a mine somewhere else is built that handles tailings even worse. These things can b…

> ...if you actually price in the...

Ding ding! We need to internalise the externalities. Put a value for pollution right into the retail price tag. Capture it as tax, and reduce other tax correspondingly.

In counties with a sales tax, this move could be approximately neutral to a basket of goods. More realistically, it will generate outrage. Fuck 'em. There's already outrage against megacorps. Take the economic hit in the short term, rebalance shopping habits, profit.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#75

Post by danbruc »

DicIfTEx wrote: post #68
danbruc wrote: post #65

1. An airplane crashes, everyone dies. Clearly a bad thing. Not so quick. For the funeral industry this means additional business, a good thing. And this is true for a LOT [1] of things, they are not good or bad, right or wrong, their judgment depends on perspective and personal preferences. 2. Which means that there is generally no policy that makes everyone happy. So you need a party with a program that aims at fin…

Here's a recent blog post in a similar vein: https://benthams.substack.com/p/voting-self-interestedly-is-... Although your plane crash example falls afoul of the broken window fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window Plus the simple fact that, by the same logic, you can try to both-sides plain murder on the ground that the murderer wants to murder (and, again, that the undertakers and coron…

The point of the example is that something that would generally be judged as obviously bad often turns out to not be bad from all perspectives. The same obviously also holds for good things. But I did not intend to imply any economics. The crash investigation might uncover an issue that gets fixed and prevents future crashes, also in this sense the crash had a positive effect. The better outcome in some overall sense would probably still have been for the airplane not to crash and the families spending the money on something better than funerals.

[...] some detractions are more worthy of consideration than others.

This is probably quite hard to justify in general.

I want zero cents of my money to be wasted on climate change, I live now and I want to enjoy my life as much as possible. I do not care if the planet gets burned to a crisp in a hundred years when I am dead.

One can certainly have a different perspective and vehemently disagree, especially if you have children that will have to live through that future, but otherwise? How would you argue that this position is somehow less valid than any other?

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#76

Post by nilirl »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #50
nilirl wrote: post #8

I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments? We're missing guardrails to allow safe experimentation and we're missing institutions to provide affordances. I think the difficult bit is figuring out how to seperate the goodness of centralized decision shaping and the badness of centralized power accumulation.

> I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments? Often, the reason is that some constituency, possibly a small one, that strongly benefits from the existing status quo, actively works against the political experiment using the judicial system; and the rest of the electorate doesn't care enough to fight them effectively to make the experiment possible. This is actually a probl…

That's fine if they're benefiting from the status quo, that decision making should be left to those in-context.

The political experiments should be chosen and driven by small units in order to be safely contained.

Planning shouldn't be a top-down activity, strategy should be. Meaning , the bounds for decisions and the rules of play must be centrally determined, but not the experiments themselves.

I don't completely follow the last bit of your comment. It sounds like you agree that a centralized planner doesn't have enough context to make system wide decisions. Am I right?

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#77

Post by nilirl »

Bratmon wrote: post #54

It's weird that this article doesn't even attempt to grapple with the reason why governments can't run big policies as experiments and cancel them if they fail: Every time the government hires a group of people to do X, that automatically creates a class of people who: 1. Depend on the government continuing to do X for their livelihoods 2. Are experts in X and know far more about it than any government official This…

Your argument hinges on deciding what "works" means.

You're saying it "works" for some people but maybe not in a way or scale that was originally intended for it to "work".

But isn't that how all learning in a complex system takes place? Doesn't mean you need to rush to cancel something?

What's wrong in saying it doesn't do what we thought it would but it does do something useful? Maybe adjust further investment based on results obtained. Ignore sunk cost.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#78

Post by nilirl »

danbruc wrote: post #65

1. An airplane crashes, everyone dies. Clearly a bad thing. Not so quick. For the funeral industry this means additional business, a good thing. And this is true for a LOT [1] of things, they are not good or bad, right or wrong, their judgment depends on perspective and personal preferences. 2. Which means that there is generally no policy that makes everyone happy. So you need a party with a program that aims at fin…

I enjoyed your comment.

Over the long term, democracies have mostly avoided self-implosion, so this political see-saw does seem to work.

The question is: is there anything we can do to make it feel better to live in?

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#79

Post by corroclaro »

graemep wrote: post #3
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #2

China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?

Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects. The west in general used to be a lot more efficient. IMO the main cause is exactly the problem the Soviet Union used to have, and China still does: centralisation.

I used to believe that but having seen repeatedly what happens when small decentralised groups get to decide (cf. HOAs in the US, housing cooperatives in Sweden), it's clear that there are too many nutters in society that seek power for power's sake and adding 20 levels of decentralized decision-making only means we'll have NIMBYs everywhere for anything new.

Having seen government work from the inside, what we need is clearer processes and _more_ centralisation - computers today enable the processing of amazing amounts of data in an extremely short time. Why do we need fourteen regional authorities to handle forms filed in triplicate?

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#80

Post by corroclaro »

energy123 wrote: post #19
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralization is an information problem. You can't make good centralized decisions if you don't have good information to base this on. China still has this problem; the data coming up the pipeline is often much more rosy than reality. But it has the problem to a much lesser degree than the USSR, because surveillance technology and data management are improving.

This is called the Local Knowledge Problem. It's why centralization can't work and has never worked, at least not until we have some ASI they can overcome it.

our ad-tech monopolist and burgeoining retail overlords control so much information on our behavioural patterns that they can probably see a crunch coming before anyone else, if they would really want to get in that game.
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