> they effectively trade in sensationalism over any kind of journalistic integrity to the "truth".
I'd disagree, my main reason for not reading the news is that it provides information that is irrelevant. Even if journalism was a source of divine truth it would still be irrelevant, since it's divine truth known by everyone, and thus useless, I'll hear about it anyway, it will provide no benefit in a competitive scenario, it will allow me to do nothing in an altruistic one.
E.g. this article is political, and I dare say potentially polarizing, but I read it because I find your opinions to be left-field enough that they may give me a unique perspective. The same applies to ADS, Scott, Hanson, etc.
Maybe this is a personal nitpick, maybe most mildly successful people stumbled upon this strategy by mistake and are unaware that's the strategy they follow, and success in anythings (ideally many things) bring happiness almost by definition. Or to put it in your own words:
> We're all day traders in information these days. We probably should acknowledge it and be wary of it.
----
> Whatever gets public attention gets pilloried. Whatever issue gets the limelight put on it becomes the next nexus.
I think this risks getting causality backwards. The opposite: public attention lingers on something for a few minutes/hours. If people find it polarizing, they get polarized and outrage happens and you hear about it more. I'm don't know if this is the case.
> If we want competent bureaucrats or technocrats or businessmen or economists or laypeople to actually solve any of our problems, it would truly be helpful for them to be given the space to try rather than be consistently be heckled from the cheap seats.
I am unaware why you are lumping businessmen with technocrats. At least based on a "libertarian" POV you could argue the system is working as intended.
Technocrats and bureaucrats *not* being able to do anything is the point, it is the only way to get governments to downscale peacefully, they end up having to downscale to critical tasks and live the rest to private industry.
Same with private industry even, it's a method of killing big corporations (or rather, letting them focus on the few things they do well and arguably need to do for society to function) and letting startups prosper.
This comment understands alpha, and I feel I agree with most of your points, except.maybe the really cynicsl one at the end. However I still find a lot of potential information, some even in the beauty contest setting, that comes from good news. Re the others, I think the constant fight to win does cause significant distress in the system, though naturally that does benefit a few it causes the whole to be less effective.
Though in hindsight I prob shouldn't have leaned on the political side as much maybe to drive the point home that scarcity of attention has made us Musashis.
I think you can rephrase it more positively by assuming a positive-sum game, e.g. hardware companies are under scrutiny due to legibility (from regulations to consumer opinions about supply chains to the many-stakeholder issues that are public companies have), thus when the software starts eating the world this allows other players to step up and do it.
I was reacting to the "not being able to do anything is the point" bit, but yes the ability for better iteration through software (or s'thing else) to create, test and experiment new systems is actually a win. And in general I feel replacement is often faster/easier/cheaper than iterative adjustment. However both these things are also gonna be subject to the same sauron's eye phenomenon though, which is the issue I find here.
In hindsight, Sauron's eye would have been a better name.
Regardless, I think "the eye" is more focused on large companies rather than small ones, even proportional to size/funding/revenue, so in that sense, I think it gets packaged with "problems of scale" that help a new generation of people (not just of tools) come to the forefront.
I recently wrote a post on my own blog about legibility as a framework. One of the things about politics that I find interesting is that most of the policies are actually very *illegible*, so the additional transparency we have is not actually making the process more *legible*, but allowing people to see which parties are pursuing what. When the object level discussion is illegible, people use proxies (Republican politician, Democrat politician) to evaluate the policies, instead of learning enough to make the object level legible to themselves. This, in turn, leads to a more polarized discussion, because everything becomes about proxies and loses track of what is actually happening.
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting thought to add to the conversation.
The problem is that new things in politics (new laws, regulations etc) can do more harm than good. Politics is different from tech because tech can *try* things and then delete it if it doesn’t work. Doesn’t work that way with laws generally. Of course, we can solve the problem (as you’ve previously discussed) by automatically including a 2 year sunset provision into every law and regulation unless specific outcomes or metrics are met. But until then, there is no “trying” things without implementing the for the long run.
I'm just not sure this is true. We're all being very careful and have erred to the point of being too careful with most things, hence the need for experimentation as a way out of our greedy algo imposed local minima.
There used to be this thing called "federalism", where cities and states could try different approaches and see what worked and what did not. Sadly, this appears to have been replaced with a "one-size-fits-all" approach, where every policy has to be applied at a national level, regardless of how well it applies to particular areas. It would be nice if we could go back to that, but I'm reliably informed that it's racist or something.
A new perspective to explain why should we discard micromanaging to each event and why should we discard some actions led us no where. But I found it is not focused on the algorithm..
i mean, yes. but i think part of being an effective quarterback is ignoring the noise.
also, huge difference between business experimenting with a free hand and letting governments do it imo. there's at least a valid case to be made for "but that's public spending" vs. letting individuals experiment.
And Roland Fryer's paper on whether police reforms follow a "viral" incident or not shows how that spike in attention can have a negative affect on those local governments.
> they effectively trade in sensationalism over any kind of journalistic integrity to the "truth".
I'd disagree, my main reason for not reading the news is that it provides information that is irrelevant. Even if journalism was a source of divine truth it would still be irrelevant, since it's divine truth known by everyone, and thus useless, I'll hear about it anyway, it will provide no benefit in a competitive scenario, it will allow me to do nothing in an altruistic one.
E.g. this article is political, and I dare say potentially polarizing, but I read it because I find your opinions to be left-field enough that they may give me a unique perspective. The same applies to ADS, Scott, Hanson, etc.
Maybe this is a personal nitpick, maybe most mildly successful people stumbled upon this strategy by mistake and are unaware that's the strategy they follow, and success in anythings (ideally many things) bring happiness almost by definition. Or to put it in your own words:
> We're all day traders in information these days. We probably should acknowledge it and be wary of it.
----
> Whatever gets public attention gets pilloried. Whatever issue gets the limelight put on it becomes the next nexus.
I think this risks getting causality backwards. The opposite: public attention lingers on something for a few minutes/hours. If people find it polarizing, they get polarized and outrage happens and you hear about it more. I'm don't know if this is the case.
> If we want competent bureaucrats or technocrats or businessmen or economists or laypeople to actually solve any of our problems, it would truly be helpful for them to be given the space to try rather than be consistently be heckled from the cheap seats.
I am unaware why you are lumping businessmen with technocrats. At least based on a "libertarian" POV you could argue the system is working as intended.
Technocrats and bureaucrats *not* being able to do anything is the point, it is the only way to get governments to downscale peacefully, they end up having to downscale to critical tasks and live the rest to private industry.
Same with private industry even, it's a method of killing big corporations (or rather, letting them focus on the few things they do well and arguably need to do for society to function) and letting startups prosper.
This comment understands alpha, and I feel I agree with most of your points, except.maybe the really cynicsl one at the end. However I still find a lot of potential information, some even in the beauty contest setting, that comes from good news. Re the others, I think the constant fight to win does cause significant distress in the system, though naturally that does benefit a few it causes the whole to be less effective.
Though in hindsight I prob shouldn't have leaned on the political side as much maybe to drive the point home that scarcity of attention has made us Musashis.
> really cynical one at the end
I think you can rephrase it more positively by assuming a positive-sum game, e.g. hardware companies are under scrutiny due to legibility (from regulations to consumer opinions about supply chains to the many-stakeholder issues that are public companies have), thus when the software starts eating the world this allows other players to step up and do it.
I was reacting to the "not being able to do anything is the point" bit, but yes the ability for better iteration through software (or s'thing else) to create, test and experiment new systems is actually a win. And in general I feel replacement is often faster/easier/cheaper than iterative adjustment. However both these things are also gonna be subject to the same sauron's eye phenomenon though, which is the issue I find here.
In hindsight, Sauron's eye would have been a better name.
Regardless, I think "the eye" is more focused on large companies rather than small ones, even proportional to size/funding/revenue, so in that sense, I think it gets packaged with "problems of scale" that help a new generation of people (not just of tools) come to the forefront.
Similarly with governments, if you look at institutions like the EU, or at burgeoning global institutions, though whether those exist is arguable.
New political institutions needn't replace old ones, they can just be faster to unlock new avenues of coordination.
You might find the work of James G. D’Angelo ( https://congressionalresearch.org/JamesDangelo.html ) on what he believes to be the benefits of legislative secrecy and the detriments of the “sunshine laws” (e.g. the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970) interesting. An article that summarizes his thesis: https://thefulcrum.us/congress/transparency-secrecy-congress.
That same line of thought can be seen in, say, Atlantic articles like https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/ and https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/lights-camera-congress/606199/
Very interesting thank you! Rauch's book was recommended by Garett Jones, which definitely informs the energy.
I recently wrote a post on my own blog about legibility as a framework. One of the things about politics that I find interesting is that most of the policies are actually very *illegible*, so the additional transparency we have is not actually making the process more *legible*, but allowing people to see which parties are pursuing what. When the object level discussion is illegible, people use proxies (Republican politician, Democrat politician) to evaluate the policies, instead of learning enough to make the object level legible to themselves. This, in turn, leads to a more polarized discussion, because everything becomes about proxies and loses track of what is actually happening.
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting thought to add to the conversation.
The problem is that new things in politics (new laws, regulations etc) can do more harm than good. Politics is different from tech because tech can *try* things and then delete it if it doesn’t work. Doesn’t work that way with laws generally. Of course, we can solve the problem (as you’ve previously discussed) by automatically including a 2 year sunset provision into every law and regulation unless specific outcomes or metrics are met. But until then, there is no “trying” things without implementing the for the long run.
I'm just not sure this is true. We're all being very careful and have erred to the point of being too careful with most things, hence the need for experimentation as a way out of our greedy algo imposed local minima.
There used to be this thing called "federalism", where cities and states could try different approaches and see what worked and what did not. Sadly, this appears to have been replaced with a "one-size-fits-all" approach, where every policy has to be applied at a national level, regardless of how well it applies to particular areas. It would be nice if we could go back to that, but I'm reliably informed that it's racist or something.
Think it's worse than that, the experimentation that goes on in diff states are barely compared or analysed to learn from. https://twitter.com/krishnanrohit/status/1444278400844193797?t=yiy8IhTw_n2sP69KzmDu-Q&s=19
A new perspective to explain why should we discard micromanaging to each event and why should we discard some actions led us no where. But I found it is not focused on the algorithm..
i mean, yes. but i think part of being an effective quarterback is ignoring the noise.
also, huge difference between business experimenting with a free hand and letting governments do it imo. there's at least a valid case to be made for "but that's public spending" vs. letting individuals experiment.
Its quite hard to ignore the noise in many situations (unlike quarterbacking), since the outcomes are much harder to measure in business or politics.
When the "spotlight" is on local government it is sometimes called "The Eye of Soros".
https://www.unz.com/?s=%22eye+of+Soros%22&Action=Search&authors=steve-sailer&ptype=isteve
And Roland Fryer's paper on whether police reforms follow a "viral" incident or not shows how that spike in attention can have a negative affect on those local governments.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/policing-the-police.html
Fascinating! And just chose sauron's eye as a better metaphor up front so the eye of Soros is apt!