Dictator's Handbook

[Elliot Temple]

The Dictator's Handbook:

> THE LOGIC OF POLITICS IS NOT COMPLEX. IN FACT, it is surprisingly easy to grasp most of what
> goes on in the political world as long as we are ready to adjust our thinking ever so modestly.
> To understand politics properly, we must modify one assumption in particular: we must stop
> thinking that leaders can lead unilaterally.

But politics involves people. Individual people are the more complex thing there is. So politics is very complex. And this book, by denying the complexity, is saying right away that it doesn't understand the complexity.

The special insight of the book, it says, is to modify one bad assumption. However, I didn't hold that assumption. The target the book is criticizing and trying to improve on is some mainstream crap. Boring!

The overall problems with books in this category is by trying to use economics, math, game theory, etc, to figure stuff out, they have to make simplifying assumptions which are false and ignore large parts of the complex human condition.

> The structure of the book is simple. After outlining the essentials of ruling in Chapter 1,
> each subsequent chapter will probe a specific feature of politics.

The book says it doesn't do much to discuss it's own framework or rivals. There's one outline chapter and then the rest is details.

> You may find it hard to believe that just these three dimensions govern all of the varied
> systems of leadership in the world. After all, our experience tends to confirm that on one end
> of the political spectrum we have autocrats and tyrants—horrible, selfish thugs who
> occasionally stray into psychopathology. On the other end, we have democrats—elected
> representatives, presidents, and prime ministers who are the benevolent guardians of freedom.
> Leaders from these two worlds, we assure ourselves, must be worlds apart!
>
> It’s a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. Governments do not differ in kind.
> They differ along the dimensions of their selectorates and winning coalitions. These dimensions
> limit or liberate what leaders can and should do to keep their jobs. How limited or liberated a
> leader is depends on how selectorates and winning coalitions interact.
>
> No question, it is tough to break the habit of

First, notice the bad epistemology of empiricist confirmation.

Second, notice the method. Rather than giving arguments, it talks about psychology and then asserts standard beliefs are "fiction". The method of persuasion attempted here is about how the claims are introduced, how they're made to sound, instead of real arguments. Read carefully and literally, it's just a bunch of unargued assertions.

Then it demeans disagreement as due to "habit" rather than reasoning.

> The first step in understanding how politics really works is to ask what kinds of policies
> leaders spend money on. Do they spend it on *public goods* that benefit everyone? Or do they
> spend mostly on *private goods* that benefit only a few?

This misuses economics jargon. The sort of "public good" most people have heard of is a *non-excludable* good, and the concept is used in a standard anti-capitalist argument. At best this is confusing, and at worst it's an attempt to equivocate and use a mix of both meanings.

Also what about libraries? They don't benefit literally everyone. This is sloppy writing.

> Staying in power, as we now know, requires the support of others. This support is only
> forthcoming if a leader provides his essentials with more benefits than they might expect to
> receive under alternative leadership or government. When essential followers expect to be
> better off under the wing of some political challenger, they desert.

But tons of Obama's opponents (who though he was harming the country and themselves) supported him staying in power until the end of his term.

---

But what's most notable is what the book omits. It simply doesn't talk about most of what matters. It's missing the point. It assumes a framework from the outset without appearing to even realize it's done so. Then it's blind to stuff outside of that such as morality and all of the authors in the field that I respect.

None of this is surprising. It’s just double checking things I already knew. For the 500th time.

Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[anonymous FI]

Here's a few people NOT mentioned in the book:

Adam Smith, Locke, Mises, Rand, Burke, Godwin, Popper, Hazlitt, Deutsch,
Dawkins, Darwin, Hayek, Rothbard, Friedman, Bastiat, Turgot, Menger,
Wieser, Mill, and Eugen Böhm von Bawerk. Marx and Keynes are just
barely mentioned, not discussed.

So it's not trying to engage with existing knowledge about economics,
liberalism, or socialism.


> In looking for places that may be good targets for democratization, it
> is probably a good idea to look to places that rely on tourists for a
> big chunk of their economy, like Kenya, Fiji, and an independent
> Palestine, which hopes to be a big tourist destination.

What bad judgement to think Palestine is a good target for
democratization. And this is the same guy who told Israel not to worry
so much about Iranian nukes.

> The president’s “solemn duty” highlights the problem. There is
> an inherent tension between promoting democratic reform abroad and
> protecting the welfare of the people here at home. Free, democratic
> societies typically live in peace with each other and promote
> prosperity at home as well as between nations, making representative
> government attractive to people throughout the world. Yet democratic
> reform, as the experiences of the United States with Khomeini’s Iran
> and Hamas-led Palestine make clear, does not always also enhance the
> security or welfare of Americans (or citizens elsewhere in the world)
> against foreign threats and may even jeopardize that security.

So many things wrong with these comments on "democratic reform" in Iran
and Palestine. And why even bring up such big, difficult, off-topic
subjects if you aren't going to spend more than a sentence on them?
Because the writer assumes all his readers already agree with him about
these issues?

> The picture we paint will not be pretty. It will not strengthen hope
> for humankind’s benevolence and altruism.

So the book is pro-altruism. Gross.

> Yes we want people to be free and prosperous, but we don’t want them
> to be free and
> prosperous enough to threaten our way of life, our interests, and our
> well-being—and that is as it should be.

So the author thinks freedom and prosperity elsewhere are a threat to
America and it's right for Americans to try to limit the freedom and
prosperity of others.

He's basically pro-war in the just sorta general sense of approving of
people fighting each other. He's not in the liberal tradition of wanting
peace and cooperation for mutual benefit.

This is so *evil*. And of course has no relevant arguments that address
my view, nor address well known published views by many of the authors I
mentioned above.

[Max Kaye]

On 15 Sep 2017, at 8:43, Elliot Temple wrote:

> The Dictator's Handbook:
>
>> THE LOGIC OF POLITICS IS NOT COMPLEX. IN FACT, it is surprisingly
>> easy to grasp most of what
>> goes on in the political world as long as we are ready to adjust our
>> thinking ever so modestly.
>> To understand politics properly, we must modify one assumption in
>> particular: we must stop
>> thinking that leaders can lead unilaterally.
>
> But politics involves people. Individual people are the more complex
> thing there is. So politics is very complex. And this book, by denying
> the complexity, is saying right away that it doesn't understand the
> complexity.

I agree, and it falls into a trap you’ve pointed out about claiming
things are simple when they’re not, and how that can really dissuade
people if they get stuck. I guess the other thing is that if it really
were simple there would probably be no need to write a book with
hundreds of pages (or that someone had written it before).

I don’t actually think it follows through on that claim, though -
there’s a lot of complex ideas in there, even if each link is simple.

> The special insight of the book, it says, is to modify one bad
> assumption. However, I didn't hold that assumption. The target the
> book is criticizing and trying to improve on is some mainstream crap.
> Boring!

I suspect this is more to do with suiting the theory to one audience
(similar to the trap mentioned above), instead of dealing with it from a
more foundational view (even BoI is classified as pop-science, after
all; you can’t put it all in there). It’s not just one assumption
the selectorate theory changes - there’s a lot in there (that’s
theory-laden) that’s just implicit, which is a problem. Not laying
that out makes it harder to understand (or believe that there is
something worth understanding).

> The overall problems with books in this category is by trying to use
> economics, math, game theory, etc, to figure stuff out, they have to
> make simplifying assumptions which are false and ignore large parts of
> the complex human condition.

So yes the theory does make simplifying assumptions (in much the same
way that many economics theories do, too - like 'rational actors'; I
prefer 'purely sub-optimal creative actors', but you can’t model
those).

However, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hit on some objective
truth. Newton’s theory of gravity had lots of simplifying assumptions,
but it still had (and has) value. It’s a trap, but as long as you’re
aware of it you can still make progress with simplified conditions.

>> You may find it hard to believe that just these three dimensions
>> govern all of the varied
>> systems of leadership in the world. After all, our experience tends
>> to confirm that on one end
>> of the political spectrum we have autocrats and tyrants—horrible,
>> selfish thugs who
>> occasionally stray into psychopathology. On the other end, we have
>> democrats—elected
>> representatives, presidents, and prime ministers who are the
>> benevolent guardians of freedom.
>> Leaders from these two worlds, we assure ourselves, must be worlds
>> apart!
>>
>> It’s a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. Governments
>> do not differ in kind.
>> They differ along the dimensions of their selectorates and winning
>> coalitions. These dimensions
>> limit or liberate what leaders can and should do to keep their jobs.
>> How limited or liberated a
>> leader is depends on how selectorates and winning coalitions
>> interact.
>>

> First, notice the bad epistemology of empiricist confirmation.
>
> Second, notice the method. Rather than giving arguments, it talks
> about psychology and then asserts standard beliefs are "fiction". The
> method of persuasion attempted here is about how the claims are
> introduced, how they're made to sound, instead of real arguments. Read
> carefully and literally, it's just a bunch of unargued assertions.

So that passage is a bunch of unargued assertions, but it is very early
on in the book. BoI (in the Intro) has a bunch of assertions too, though
they’re argued later in the book.

BoI Intro:

>> Whenever there has been progress, there have been in influential
>> thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or
>> even that the concept was meaningful. They should have known better.

BoI Ch 1:

>> Experience is indeed essential to science, but its role is different
>> from that supposed by empiricism. It is not the source from which
>> theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that
>> have already been guessed. That is what ‘learning from
>> experience’ is.

Are these substantially different in a way I don’t see? I definitely
*agree* with DD more, but I aren’t all assertions equal in their
assertion-ness?

I’ve always interpreted author’s tendency to do this as more of a
"synchronisation" that happens before fuller explanations start (if they
really do start). Kind of like "here are some assertions, and while
I’ll explain them later, these should give you an idea of where I am
now, and were we’re going". DD does this well (Ch1 is nearly 10% of
the book)

I guess the _Dictators Handbook_ quote is a bit different in that
there’s a lot of more *foundational* assumptions, but that seems true
for DD’s quote too.
Also, the point of that section (Virtues of 3-d politics) is to get us
out of the habit of thinking of political systems in simple categories.
The author introduces terminology describing people within political
systems shortly after your quote: "interchangeables, influentials, and
essentials"

>> The beauty of talking about organizations in terms of essentials,
>> influentials, and interchangeables is that these categories permit us
>> to refrain from arbitrarily drawing a line between forms of
>> governance, pronouncing one “democratic” and another
>> “autocratic,” or one a large republic and another small, or any
>> of the other mostly one-dimensional views of politics expressed by
>> some of history’s leading political philosophers.

In regards to the assertions, here’s another example:

>> Leaders make rules to give all citizens the vote—creating lots of
>> new interchangeables—but then impose electoral boundaries, stacking
>> the deck of essential voters to ensure that their preferred
>> candidates win.

Now he doesn’t argue this at the time, but this is gerrymandering, and
we know it goes on. Is there a problem with assertions that are true in
this way?

> Then it demeans disagreement as due to "habit" rather than reasoning.

The habit thing seems to relate particularly to *the way we talk about
democracies and dictatorships*:

>> No question, it is tough to break the habit of talking about
>> democracies and dictatorships as if either of these terms is
>> sufficient to convey the differences across regimes, even though no
>> two “democracies” are alike and neither are any two
>> “dictatorships.”

I don’t really disagree with that statement - we’re not used to
talking about political intricacies, so it’s easy to fall into a trap
of assuming there is too much that’s common between "all democracies"
or "all dictatorships", etc.

>> The first step in understanding how politics really works is to ask
>> what kinds of policies
>> leaders spend money on. Do they spend it on *public goods* that
>> benefit everyone? Or do they
>> spend mostly on *private goods* that benefit only a few?
>
> This misuses economics jargon. The sort of "public good" most people
> have heard of is a *non-excludable* good, and the concept is used in a
> standard anti-capitalist argument. At best this is confusing, and at
> worst it's an attempt to equivocate and use a mix of both meanings.
>
> Also what about libraries? They don't benefit literally everyone. This
> is sloppy writing.

Well if I google 'public good' google gives me: "a commodity or service
that is provided without profit to all members of a society", so perhaps
they don’t benefit everyone, but they are _provided_ to everyone.
Sloppy? yes.

Wiki: "In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable
and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded
from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to
others."

I do agree he’s overloaded the definition, though. Within the
selectorate theory it has a much broader definition, like building *a
particular school*, which seems both excludable and rivalrous. The
difference being that *education itself* can be a public good, but *a
particular school* is not. Not sure if this is the misuse you refer to.

>> Staying in power, as we now know, requires the support of others.
>> This support is only
>> forthcoming if a leader provides his essentials with more benefits
>> than they might expect to
>> receive under alternative leadership or government. When essential
>> followers expect to be
>> better off under the wing of some political challenger, they desert.
>
> But tons of Obama's opponents (who though he was harming the country
> and themselves) supported him staying in power until the end of his
> term.

a) those people weren’t in *his* selectorate, so it didn’t matter
b) there’s a massive overtone along the lines of "respect for
democracy" there, though the selectorate theory also talks about the
consequences for trying to subvert a democracy, and that those who do
end up destroying some of the wealth they’re aspiring to control or
influence one day.

(This is a very general use of 'wealth': it includes the value of a
functional democratic system, tax income, ability to enact legislation,
support from keys, etc)

A more appropriate comparison is: "did those opponents support Biden
more and have the power to impeach or remove Obama?" Presuming they
didn’t want to launch a coup, that’s really the only choice they
had, right?

> ---
>
> But what's most notable is what the book omits. It simply doesn't talk
> about most of what matters. It's missing the point. It assumes a
> framework from the outset without appearing to even realize it's done
> so. Then it's blind to stuff outside of that such as morality and all
> of the authors in the field that I respect.
>
> None of this is surprising. It’s just double checking things I
> already knew. For the 500th time.

You don’t actually mention what matters here - so it’s hard to
respond (perhaps in the same way it’s hard for you to respond to me
sometimes 😛).

The other thing is that the Dictator’s handbook is *not* trying to
argue how things [1] *should* be - it tries to understand *why they are
the way they are now*, and adopts a mainstream framework to do that.

1: "Things" in this case means "the behaviour of rulers and people in
power". I’m not sure if I or the book has made that clear.


Max

[Max Kaye]

On 15 Sep 2017, at 9:15, anonymous FI wrote:
>
>> The Dictator's Handbook:
>>

> Here's a few people NOT mentioned in the book:
>
> Adam Smith, Locke, Mises, Rand, Burke, Godwin, Popper, Hazlitt,
> Deutsch, Dawkins, Darwin, Hayek, Rothbard, Friedman, Bastiat, Turgot,
> Menger, Wieser, Mill, and Eugen Böhm von Bawerk. Marx and Keynes are
> just barely mentioned, not discussed.
>
> So it's not trying to engage with existing knowledge about economics,
> liberalism, or socialism.

Admittedly it doesn’t, but it is also putting forward a novel theory
of power, and I don’t think that it actually overlaps that much with
existing knowledge about economics, liberalism, or socialism - except
insofar as describing expenditure at the like.

I’ve found lots of ways it seems compatible (while not finding any
massive contradictions) with some of the names up there. Memes are an
easy one, evolution (of rulers) is another, seeking well-suited policy
answers (even though the understanding is far inferior to DD’s on
this):

>> # Democracy Is an Arms Race for Good Ideas
>> Competition in democracies is cerebral, not physical. Killing foes
>> works for dictators, but it is a pretty surefire path to political
>> oblivion in a democracy. That’s a good thing, from a moral
>> standpoint, of course. But from a democrat’s point of view, the
>> corollary is that even good public policy does not buy much loyalty.
>> Everyone consumes policy benefits whether they support the incumbent
>> or not. If a leader cleans up the environment or solves global
>> warming then everyone is a winner, although of course the extent to
>> which individuals value these things will vary. But past deeds
>> don’t buy loyalty. When a rival appears with a cheaper way to fix
>> the environment, or the rival finds policy fixes for other **problems
>> that people care about more**, then the rival can seize power through
>> the ballot box. Autocratic politics is a battle for private rewards.
>> **Democratic politics is a battle for good policy ideas**.

(emphasis mine)

I mean he’s actually saying *the creation of new options* is an
important part of democracy.

He also treats his example problems simplistically, which is annoying,
and it’s a bit value-laden. (e.g. there are many ways to "solve"
global warming right now, like killing all the humans, where we are not
all winners; personal note: I align with DD’s view in Ch17 of BoI
"unsustainable")

>> In looking for places that may be good targets for democratization,
>> it is probably a good idea to look to places that rely on tourists
>> for a big chunk of their economy, like Kenya, Fiji, and an
>> independent Palestine, which hopes to be a big tourist destination.
>
> What bad judgement to think Palestine is a good target for
> democratization. And this is the same guy who told Israel not to worry
> so much about Iranian nukes.
>
>> The president’s “solemn duty” highlights the problem. There is
>> an inherent tension between promoting democratic reform abroad and
>> protecting the welfare of the people here at home. Free, democratic
>> societies typically live in peace with each other and promote
>> prosperity at home as well as between nations, making representative
>> government attractive to people throughout the world. Yet democratic
>> reform, as the experiences of the United States with Khomeini’s
>> Iran and Hamas-led Palestine make clear, does not always also enhance
>> the security or welfare of Americans (or citizens elsewhere in the
>> world) against foreign threats and may even jeopardize that security.
>
> So many things wrong with these comments on "democratic reform" in
> Iran and Palestine. And why even bring up such big, difficult,
> off-topic subjects if you aren't going to spend more than a sentence
> on them? Because the writer assumes all his readers already agree with
> him about these issues?

I suspect so. It also annoys me that he talks about "democratic reform"
as some sort of universal good, even though _his own theory_ predicts
that it fails in many environments.

>> The picture we paint will not be pretty. It will not strengthen hope
>> for humankind’s benevolence and altruism.
>
> So the book is pro-altruism. Gross.

I don’t think it is; *he* might be, but I also don’t think that’s
necessarily true or shown in that quote.

>> Yes we want people to be free and prosperous, but we don’t want
>> them to be free and
>> prosperous enough to threaten our way of life, our interests, and our
>> well-being—and that is as it should be.
>
> So the author thinks freedom and prosperity elsewhere are a threat to
> America and it's right for Americans to try to limit the freedom and
> prosperity of others.

Not in an explanationless way, the preceding paragraph (which lives
between "free and prosperous" and "president’s solemn duty") reads:

>> Our individual concerns about protecting ourselves from unfriendly
>> democracies elsewhere typically trump our longer term belief in the
>> benefits of democracy. Democratic leaders listen to their voters
>> because that is how they and their political party get to keep their
>> jobs. Democratic leaders were elected, after all, to advance the
>> current interests at least of those who chose them. The long run is
>> always on someone else’s watch. Democracy overseas is a great thing
>> for us if, and only if, the people of a democratizing nation happen
>> to want policies that we like. When a foreign people are aligned
>> against our best interest, our best chance of getting what we want is
>> to keep them under the yoke of an oppressor who is willing to do what
>> we, the people, want.

Notice that he’s not arguing that this is *universal* either, he does
frame it particularly with the first sentence to talk particularly about
unfriendly democracies.

I don’t see this as any different from arguing that damaging and
dangerous cultures should be kept out of America - it’s preferable to
let them be worse off than to risk both the American culture and people.

> He's basically pro-war in the just sorta general sense of approving of
> people fighting each other. He's not in the liberal tradition of
> wanting peace and cooperation for mutual benefit.

I think he does actually want that, or does agree with that. You even
quoted before:

>> Free, democratic societies typically live in peace with each other
>> and promote prosperity at home as well as between nations

> This is so *evil*.

I’m not yet convinced of that, though I am convinced that Bueno de
Mesquita has some anti-rational memes in him (as we all do).

> And of course has no relevant arguments that address my view, nor
> address well known published views by many of the authors I mentioned
> above.

From what I know, most of them haven’t written on *why power changes
the wielder’s behaviour in the way it does*, so not sure there’s
much to respond to. I don’t think that economics really comes into it
- it’s a different level of emergence.


Max

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 15, 2017, at 9:29 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15 Sep 2017, at 8:43, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> The Dictator's Handbook:

>> The overall problems with books in this category is by trying to use economics, math, game theory, etc, to figure stuff out, they have to make simplifying assumptions which are false and ignore large parts of the complex human condition.
>
> So yes the theory does make simplifying assumptions (in much the same way that many economics theories do, too - like 'rational actors'; I prefer 'purely sub-optimal creative actors', but you can’t model those).

the simplifying assumptions should be written down and then carefully analyzed to try to understand what problems they may cause with the conclusions reached. similar to how scientists should list sources of error and try to talk about every way they could be mistaken.

they should say they made this simplifying assumption b/c they think it's approximately right b/c...

and they made this other simplifying assumption b/c they think the following argument is correct... and given that argument, then it's a good approximation. but if the argument is wrong, then they're about that simplification. and if they're wrong about that simplification, then the broader consequences are...

is this done somewhere?

>>> You may find it hard to believe that just these three dimensions govern all of the varied
>>> systems of leadership in the world. After all, our experience tends to confirm that on one end
>>> of the political spectrum we have autocrats and tyrants—horrible, selfish thugs who
>>> occasionally stray into psychopathology. On the other end, we have democrats—elected
>>> representatives, presidents, and prime ministers who are the benevolent guardians of freedom.
>>> Leaders from these two worlds, we assure ourselves, must be worlds apart!
>>>
>>> It’s a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. Governments do not differ in kind.
>>> They differ along the dimensions of their selectorates and winning coalitions. These dimensions
>>> limit or liberate what leaders can and should do to keep their jobs. How limited or liberated a
>>> leader is depends on how selectorates and winning coalitions interact.
>>>
>> First, notice the bad epistemology of empiricist confirmation.
>>
>> Second, notice the method. Rather than giving arguments, it talks about psychology and then asserts standard beliefs are "fiction". The method of persuasion attempted here is about how the claims are introduced, how they're made to sound, instead of real arguments. Read carefully and literally, it's just a bunch of unargued assertions.
>
> So that passage is a bunch of unargued assertions, but it is very early on in the book. BoI (in the Intro) has a bunch of assertions too, though they’re argued later in the book.
>
> BoI Intro:
>
>>> Whenever there has been progress, there have been in influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the concept was meaningful. They should have known better.
>
> BoI Ch 1:
>
>>> Experience is indeed essential to science, but its role is different from that supposed by empiricism. It is not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed. That is what ‘learning from experience’ is.
>
> Are these substantially different in a way I don’t see? I definitely *agree* with DD more, but I aren’t all assertions equal in their assertion-ness?

They're different. I analyze the passage in https://gum.co/EyJnB

> I’ve always interpreted author’s tendency to do this as more of a "synchronisation" that happens before fuller explanations start (if they really do start). Kind of like "here are some assertions, and while I’ll explain them later, these should give you an idea of where I am now, and were we’re going". DD does this well (Ch1 is nearly 10% of the book)

yes but the DH passage contains stuff for other purposes besides synchronization/previewing/structural-outlining. (see the podcast)

if DH argues that point well, later, please give the quote (at least enough to uniquely identify it in a search of the ebook). if not, isn't that a problem?

>>> Leaders make rules to give all citizens the vote—creating lots of new interchangeables—but then impose electoral boundaries, stacking the deck of essential voters to ensure that their preferred candidates win.
>
> Now he doesn’t argue this at the time, but this is gerrymandering, and we know it goes on. Is there a problem with assertions that are true in this way?

my issue with that quote (without reading the context) is that SOME leaders do that, and some don't. and it's not very clear about how broadly it's saying this happens, or in what circumstances it does/doesn't happen.

it doesn't talk about which leaders do this AND WHY, and what ideas cause or prevent it.

>> Then it demeans disagreement as due to "habit" rather than reasoning.
>
> The habit thing seems to relate particularly to *the way we talk about democracies and dictatorships*:
>
>>> No question, it is tough to break the habit of talking about democracies and dictatorships as if either of these terms is sufficient to convey the differences across regimes, even though no two “democracies” are alike and neither are any two “dictatorships.”
>
> I don’t really disagree with that statement - we’re not used to talking about political intricacies, so it’s easy to fall into a trap of assuming there is too much that’s common between "all democracies" or "all dictatorships", etc.

you don't disagree with it b/c it's written defensively. it actually says little. the main content is by suggestion rather than direct claim. that makes it hard to argue with because it hasn't stuck its neck out. a person advocating it can retreat to a weaker position to avoid being wrong.

>
>>> The first step in understanding how politics really works is to ask what kinds of policies
>>> leaders spend money on. Do they spend it on *public goods* that benefit everyone? Or do they
>>> spend mostly on *private goods* that benefit only a few?
>>
>> This misuses economics jargon. The sort of "public good" most people have heard of is a *non-excludable* good, and the concept is used in a standard anti-capitalist argument. At best this is confusing, and at worst it's an attempt to equivocate and use a mix of both meanings.
>>
>> Also what about libraries? They don't benefit literally everyone. This is sloppy writing.
>
> Well if I google 'public good' google gives me: "a commodity or service that is provided without profit to all members of a society", so perhaps they don’t benefit everyone, but they are _provided_ to everyone. Sloppy? yes.
>
> Wiki: "In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others."
>
> I do agree he’s overloaded the definition, though. Within the selectorate theory it has a much broader definition, like building *a particular school*, which seems both excludable and rivalrous. The difference being that *education itself* can be a public good, but *a particular school* is not. Not sure if this is the misuse you refer to.

it's a term the authors should have known to be careful with. they ought to know enough economics to be aware of this issue. so i think this mistake indicates something significant is going wrong.

>> But what's most notable is what the book omits. It simply doesn't talk about most of what matters. It's missing the point. It assumes a framework from the outset without appearing to even realize it's done so. Then it's blind to stuff outside of that such as morality and all of the authors in the field that I respect.
>>
>> None of this is surprising. It’s just double checking things I already knew. For the 500th time.
>
> You don’t actually mention what matters here - so it’s hard to respond (perhaps in the same way it’s hard for you to respond to me sometimes 😛).

what matters is morality and ideas (including the unpredictable creation of new ideas, memes, traditions, ideas about reason, etc).

> The other thing is that the Dictator’s handbook is *not* trying to argue how things [1] *should* be - it tries to understand *why they are the way they are now*, and adopts a mainstream framework to do that.

the reason things are the way they are now is b/c of e.g.:

- parenting traditions, which consist of (largely bad) ideas

- socialism, which is a set of ideas which has persuaded lots of people of a lot of ideas (this is partly enabled by the bad parenting)

- capitalism, which has persuaded lots of people of some good ideas

DH doesn't try to analyze this kind of thing, so it's not useful for understanding the present situation.

there's also more specific stuff (e.g. feminism, environmentalism, the tea party ideas, and then there's levels below that). and there's specific issues like the leftist control over the media and universities and why the left's ideas are so dominant in those places. but DH isn't even joining the conversation on the broadest level of discussing liberalism, authoritarian ideas, pro-violence ideas, etc. (this is judging by the incomplete parts i read and what it communicated the rest would be like)


Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 15, 2017, at 9:54 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15 Sep 2017, at 9:15, anonymous FI wrote:
>>
>>> The Dictator's Handbook:
>>>
>> Here's a few people NOT mentioned in the book:
>>
>> Adam Smith, Locke, Mises, Rand, Burke, Godwin, Popper, Hazlitt, Deutsch, Dawkins, Darwin, Hayek, Rothbard, Friedman, Bastiat, Turgot, Menger, Wieser, Mill, and Eugen Böhm von Bawerk. Marx and Keynes are just barely mentioned, not discussed.
>>
>> So it's not trying to engage with existing knowledge about economics, liberalism, or socialism.
>
> Admittedly it doesn’t, but it is also putting forward a novel theory of power, and I don’t think that it actually overlaps that much with existing knowledge about economics, liberalism, or socialism - except insofar as describing expenditure at the like.

it should build on them, or say where/why they're mistaken, or say how they're incomplete. it shouldn't just ignore them.

>>> **Democratic politics is a battle for good policy ideas**.

good policy ideas aren't created by bribing supporters with treasure.

>>> Yes we want people to be free and prosperous, but we don’t want them to be free and
>>> prosperous enough to threaten our way of life, our interests, and our well-being—and that is as it should be.
>>
>> So the author thinks freedom and prosperity elsewhere are a threat to America and it's right for Americans to try to limit the freedom and prosperity of others.
>
> Not in an explanationless way,

there was no explanation, just a simplified model that some countries have people with hostile interests to ours (sorta ok) and if they were more powerful (while being assumed to keep the same ideas – this part is no good) that'd be bad for us.

more on this in the podcast https://gum.co/EyJnB

> the preceding paragraph (which lives between "free and prosperous" and "president’s solemn duty") reads:
>
>>> Our individual concerns about protecting ourselves from unfriendly democracies elsewhere typically trump our longer term belief in the benefits of democracy.

what unfriendly democracies? when was the last time two democracies went to war against each other?

is there any dictatorship in the world we'd prefer stay that way, rather than change into one of mildly unfriendly democracies like Germany?

>>> Democratic leaders listen to their voters because that is how they and their political party get to keep their jobs.

this is a blanket statement. but current US politics is a counter example.

Trump and many other Republicans have been ignoring the demands of their voters for a long time. a few have lost their jobs as a result, but many others have retained their jobs.

>>> Democratic leaders were elected, after all, to advance the current interests at least of those who chose them.

they are not!

they are elected to advance some policies they offered. this isn't about promoting someone's interests, it's about ideas about good policies.

good people don't vote for their own interests to be advanced. they aren't looking for win/lose outcomes in their favor. they are trying to figure out what's objectively good and get that.

the large majority of Americans would prefer government policies they're convinced are objectively good over policies aimed at advancing their current personal interests. (these are largely compatible, but it's the objective good they focus on, and rightly so. they focus more on their personal interests when there's a LARGE effect at stake, but they're virtuous enough to be pretty objective about most policies.)

why do they do this? because they think it's the morally right way to vote (ideas!), and they care about issues (like which policies are better and which political arguments are correct), and they're comfortable enough not to be desperate to get a handout. they also care about things like *fairness*.

>>> The long run is always on someone else’s watch.

and yet most Americans care about it anyway, even ones without children. because they think the long run is important. that's an idea they believe.

>>> Democracy overseas is a great thing for us if, and only if, the people of a democratizing nation happen to want policies that we like.

there's many things wrong with this. one is it ignores history and the current world situation. when has some other democracy actually been bad for us?

>>> When a foreign people are aligned against our best interest, our best chance of getting what we want is to keep them under the yoke of an oppressor who is willing to do what we, the people, want.
>
> Notice that he’s not arguing that this is *universal* either, he does frame it particularly with the first sentence to talk particularly about unfriendly democracies.
>
> I don’t see this as any different from arguing that damaging and dangerous cultures should be kept out of America - it’s preferable to let them be worse off than to risk both the American culture and people.

one thing you're ignoring is the effect of democracy on people's ideas. it helps create new knowledge which helps people change their minds.

the yoke of the oppressor keeps the people ignorant and hostile, and gives them less opportunity to pursue positive values in their own lives.

>> And of course has no relevant arguments that address my view, nor address well known published views by many of the authors I mentioned above.
>
> From what I know, most of them haven’t written on *why power changes the wielder’s behaviour in the way it does*,

it doesn't. behavior is determined by ideas. ideas about power and about one's situation and things like that can be relevant, though aren't controlling (one may still reach whatever conclusions).

> so not sure there’s much to respond to. I don’t think that economics really comes into it - it’s a different level of emergence.

claims about being threatened by the prosperity of other countries should involve addressing previous knowledge of that topic.


Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Max Kaye]

On 16 Sep 2017, at 15:19, Elliot Temple wrote:

> On Sep 15, 2017, at 9:54 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
>> On 15 Sep 2017, at 9:15, anonymous FI wrote:
>>>
>>>> The Dictator's Handbook:
>>>>

>>>> **Democratic politics is a battle for good policy ideas**.
>
> good policy ideas aren't created by bribing supporters with treasure.

Well, I mean they are when the treasure *is* the policy idea and the
supporters are the voters. Almost by definition.

The second interpretation is that the "good policy ideas" are ideas that
are well suited to the particular selectorate factions you’re trying
to appease. These are *good* ideas in the sense that they satisfy desire
in a way that most changes to the policy would diminish its ability to
do that. They’re not good ideas in the sense that they hit on
objective truths outside of our local human context.

>>>> Yes we want people to be free and prosperous, but we don’t want
>>>> them to be free and
>>>> prosperous enough to threaten our way of life, our interests, and
>>>> our well-being—and that is as it should be.
>>>
>>> So the author thinks freedom and prosperity elsewhere are a threat
>>> to America and it's right for Americans to try to limit the freedom
>>> and prosperity of others.
>>
>> Not in an explanationless way,
>
> there was no explanation, just a simplified model that some countries
> have people with hostile interests to ours (sorta ok) and if they were
> more powerful (while being assumed to keep the same ideas – this
> part is no good) that'd be bad for us.
>
> more on this in the podcast https://gum.co/EyJnB

I’ve managed to listen to the first 30-40 minutes or so (so far), and
while it doesn’t seem like you talk about it that much, I do think I
have some responses.

In this case, how would you feel about Iran becoming prosperous? I
don’t think it’s controversial to say that *too much* prosperity in
Iran would threaten the US. (Note, the quote itself does not mention
democracy)

There are secondary arguments here about prosperity encouraging better
ideas, and the positive feedback between economics, prosperity, liberty,
intellectual freedom, etc.

*However*, it is the case that a productive unfriendly nation is more of
a threat to "us" than a poor unfriendly nation. (Whoever "us" happens to
be in this case).

In most cases other nation’s freedom and prosperity does not threaten
our own (Australia and the US are easy examples), and then it’s fine.
But if another nation’s prosperity (possibly through oil) threatened
our own, *and this was a salient threat*, I’d expect the US and
Australia to react.

Another way to look at this: **eventually the US will become the
problem**. Since the US (like Australia) is not based in fallibilism
(though maybe has some small ability to correct errors over a long
time), as we grow as a society both the US and Australia will **need**
to change, or they will *become* the problem. *Everything* eventually
becomes a problem if it doesn’t have a good enough system of error
correction, and canonical democracy is **really** bad at it.

Note: dictatorships are definitely *worse* at this than our democracies.
That means they’ll become problems first, before our systems of
governance do. However, once the world in general is more prosperous, or
western countries become even *more* prosperous, these systems of
governance will *need* to change. I mean surely you agree that they can
be improved? That there are future breakthroughs with democracy to
uncover? And that those improvements will be unintuitive but far better
for us? (In the same way new scientific breakthroughs are unintuitive
and also better)

>> the preceding paragraph (which lives between "free and prosperous"
>> and
>> "president’s solemn duty") reads:
>>
>>>> Our individual concerns about protecting ourselves from unfriendly
>>>> democracies elsewhere typically trump our longer term belief in the
>>>> benefits of democracy.
>
> what unfriendly democracies? when was the last time two democracies
> went to war against each other?
>
> is there any dictatorship in the world we'd prefer stay that way,
> rather than change into one of mildly unfriendly democracies like
> Germany?

Well Nazi Germany was a democracy. I’ll just point to [2] though.

[2] links to wiki’s article on "Democratic Peace Theory" and is only
linked for the list of counterexamples. I think the theory itself is
essentially explanationless and empirical, a much better explanation is
via economics / trading partners / opportunity cost of war, etc, and the
tendency for democratic nations to be very productive and thus have a
lot of benefits from trading with each other.

The selectorate theory actually explains *why* democratic nations are
more productive, and it’s not because they’re democracies. Rather
they’re democratic *because* they’re productive. See [3]

That doesn’t *exclude* the possibility of a future democracy-democracy
war, though. Especially if democracies become unstable due to a downturn
in the productivity of the workers or a massive new source of natural
resources is discovered. (Again, see [3])

>>>> Democratic leaders listen to their voters because that is how they
>>>> and their political party get to keep their jobs.
>
> this is a blanket statement. but current US politics is a counter
> example.
>
> Trump and many other Republicans have been ignoring the demands of
> their voters for a long time. a few have lost their jobs as a result,
> but many others have retained their jobs.

I’d argue that Trump was able to win because other candidates
*didn’t* listen to their voters, or underestimated their voters’
willingness to support another candidate. I discuss this idea a bit more
in my response to your post on "End states who sponsor terrorism".

If Trump ignores his voters too much he won’t get reelected. [1]

So I don’t see it as a counter-example at all, in fact I think it
explains it well.

Additionally, Clinton (H) did not satisfy her voters *enough* (there’s
another question, too: was that ever possible?)

>>>> Democratic leaders were elected, after all, to advance the current
>>>> interests at least of those who chose them.
>
> they are not!
>
> they are elected to advance some policies they offered. this isn't
> about promoting someone's interests, it's about ideas about good
> policies.

> it's about ideas about good policies.

That would be nice, but when was the last time you heard someone discuss
the philosophy of a good policy? When was the last time there was a good
affirmative action policy? Ever? Yet there are affirmative action
policies.

If we do get "good" policy - it’s not in the sense DD uses the word in
BoI, and often they’re not based on good explanations.

I wish it were about good ideas, philosophy, and good policy. I
desperately want that to be the case because I think the world would be
*so much better* if it embraced that. But people don’t want to be
criticised, and they don’t want their political views criticised
either. They don’t want *good* policy, they want *their* policy.

> they are elected to advance some policies they offered

Yes, and the people who want those policies are the ones that voted for
them. Some voters did their research and think the policies are good,
but most voters want them *because they like them*, and most voters
don’t apply rationality to that. It’s much easier to be
self-interested than vote for good ideas.

Why would people not be self-interested in politics when they are
self-interested economically?

> good people don't vote for their own interests to be advanced. they
> aren't
> looking for win/lose outcomes in their favor. they are trying to
> figure out what's objectively good and get that.

If you define "good people" as people who already are willing to vote
for the best policies, regardless of the impact on them, then you’re
right.

But most people aren’t like that. They’re not looking for the
"/lose" part of that, but they’re definitely looking for the "win"
part of that.

I see it every *day* in modern democracies, or at least Australia’s
(and it’s not much different to the US - not PR based, at least)

I can give examples if you want. But it’s not hard to criticise most
policies (especially when they don’t come with explanations; they’re
just lists of instructions and rules with no reasoning behind them).

> the large majority of Americans would prefer government policies
> they're convinced are objectively good over policies aimed at
> advancing their current personal interests. (these are largely
> compatible, but it's the objective good they focus on, and rightly so.
> they focus more on their personal interests when there's a LARGE
> effect at stake, but they're virtuous enough to be pretty objective
> about most policies.)

I don’t see that at all. Is there any evidence for this?

> why do they do this? because they think it's the morally right way to
> vote (ideas!), and they care about issues (like which policies are
> better and which political arguments are correct), and they're
> comfortable enough not to be desperate to get a handout. they also
> care about things like *fairness*.

But they’re not rational! How do they know what good ideas look like
if they can’t even find them in their own lives?

If you were arguing that rep democracy worked with a population of
critical fallibilists, I’d be inclined to agree. But most of the
voting population is *so far* from that it’s not funny. Every time
people get up in a town hall, they’re talking about problems *they*
care about. How is that not self-interest?

>>>> The long run is always on someone else’s watch.
>
> and yet most Americans care about it anyway, even ones without
> children. because they think the long run is important. that's an idea
> they believe.

Again, I don’t think this is true. There are lots of "long run" things
we *should* have done.

An easy example is embedding cryptographic tools in ID cards; in the US
- *actually making ID cards at all* (drivers licenses aren’t
universal, and aren’t meant for ID anyway, an SSNs are **terrible**
for ID). Even in Aus we don’t have ID cards - we defer to drivers
licenses or "proof of age" cards.

The benefits of this sort of forward-thought would be massive - because
you can *build* on it. This sort of thing is *super* cheap (we’ve been
doing it for as long as we’ve had credit cards), easily upgradable
(since they expire), and have literally *no* downsides (cancelling a
card is the same process).

But then go and look back at what happens - in the long run it *is* on
someone else’s watch. After a bad representative (corrupt,
incompetent, etc) is kicked out or loses an election, ppl don’t say
"whoops, it was us, the voters who made the mistake" - and even if that
did happen it wouldn’t be true, since voters don’t have a *choice*.
Two candidates out of hundreds of thousands of voters is not a choice.

>>>> When a foreign people are aligned against our best interest, our
>>>> best chance of getting what we want is to keep them under the yoke
>>>> of an oppressor who is willing to do what we, the people, want.
>>
>> Notice that he’s not arguing that this is *universal* either, he
>> does frame it particularly with the first sentence to talk
>> particularly about unfriendly democracies.
>>
>> I don’t see this as any different from arguing that damaging and
>> dangerous cultures should be kept out of America - it’s preferable
>> to let them be worse off than to risk both the American culture and
>> people.
>
> one thing you're ignoring is the effect of democracy on people's
> ideas. it helps create new knowledge which helps people change their
> minds.
>
> the yoke of the oppressor keeps the people ignorant and hostile, and
> gives them less opportunity to pursue positive values in their own
> lives.

This is true when democracies are stable. But for stability you first
need prosperity. Think about Brazil - their democracy is dysfunctional
and corrupt. Why? Because the productivity of the people is dwarfed by
the productivity of a small number of sectors (like oil), and corruption
can be a good idea (doesn’t mean it’s a *great* idea), and moreover,
if people who are corrupt keep getting into power, what does that say
about Brazil’s democracy’s ability to select and promote good
candidates?

>>> And of course has no relevant arguments that address my view, nor
>>> address well known published views by many of the authors I
>>> mentioned above.
>>
>> From what I know, most of them haven’t written on *why power
>> changes the wielder’s behaviour in the way it does*,
>
> it doesn't. behavior is determined by ideas. ideas about power and
> about one's situation and things like that can be relevant, though
> aren't controlling (one may still reach whatever conclusions).

Ideas like "how do I react to my key supporters and voters to find the
best outcome?"

Ideas and memes don’t act external to context. They *need* context,
and power is a context. It *changes* what is expressed, to whom, and
why.

>> so not sure there’s much to respond to. I don’t think that
>> economics really comes into it - it’s a different level of
>> emergence.
>
> claims about being threatened by the prosperity of other countries
> should involve addressing previous knowledge of that topic.

That’s fair, but I’d address that like:

* Here’s the conditions where democracies get along (trade / mutual
dependence / opportunity cost of war / etc)
* And when those things go away, here’s what happens: X, Y, Z

It definitely does give us more context for when things can and can’t
happen like that, but I don’t think it disproves that it *can* happen
at all, or that we can learn things from thinking about it.


Max


[1] : I’ve pointed to this tweet once before I think (retweeted by Ann
Coulter - which is where I found it)
> If he does not build the wall, he simply will not get reelected. If he
> does build it, he will win 2020 by a landslide. It is that simple.
https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/908176374074155009


[2] :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory#Possible_exceptions

[3] : This 4.5 minute section of rules for rulers explains this well.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/rStL7niR7gs?start=733&end=1013&version=3

Transcript of section (formatted): https://pastebin.com/rb0ngVwV

[Justin Mallone]

On Sep 17, 2017, at 7:27 PM, 'Max Kaye' m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
> On 16 Sep 2017, at 15:19, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> On Sep 15, 2017, at 9:54 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>
>>> On 15 Sep 2017, at 9:15, anonymous FI wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The Dictator's Handbook:
>>>>>
>>>>> **Democratic politics is a battle for good policy ideas**.
>>
>> good policy ideas aren't created by bribing supporters with treasure.
>
> Well, I mean they are when the treasure *is* the policy idea and the
> supporters are the voters. Almost by definition.

i don't follow. you bribe supporters with policy ideas to create good policy ideas?

> The second interpretation is that the "good policy ideas" are ideas that
> are well suited to the particular selectorate factions you’re trying
> to appease. These are *good* ideas in the sense that they satisfy desire
> in a way that most changes to the policy would diminish its ability to
> do that.

That's not what good means. That definition of "good" would cover aggressive wars and scapegoating ethnic groups if those things were popular.

Question: Can you apply TDH/TST to the Holocaust as a policy? And then say your own personal thoughts about it.

> They’re not good ideas in the sense that they hit on
> objective truths outside of our local human context.
>
>>>>> Yes we want people to be free and prosperous, but we don’t want
>>>>> them to be free and
>>>>> prosperous enough to threaten our way of life, our interests, and
>>>>> our well-being—and that is as it should be.
>>>>
>>>> So the author thinks freedom and prosperity elsewhere are a threat
>>>> to America and it's right for Americans to try to limit the freedom
>>>> and prosperity of others.
>>>
>>> Not in an explanationless way,
>>
>> there was no explanation, just a simplified model that some countries
>> have people with hostile interests to ours (sorta ok) and if they were
>> more powerful (while being assumed to keep the same ideas – this
>> part is no good) that'd be bad for us.
>>
>> more on this in the podcast https://gum.co/EyJnB
>
> I’ve managed to listen to the first 30-40 minutes or so (so far), and
> while it doesn’t seem like you talk about it that much, I do think I
> have some responses.
>
> In this case, how would you feel about Iran becoming prosperous? I
> don’t think it’s controversial to say that *too much* prosperity in
> Iran would threaten the US. (Note, the quote itself does not mention
> democracy)

This did come up IIRC. Basically it depends on how they do it. If they got more prosperous by extorting their neighbors, bad. If they got more prosperous by instituting liberal reforms, good.

There's a deep relationship between prosperity & morality (both at state level and individual).

> There are secondary arguments here about prosperity encouraging better
> ideas, and the positive feedback between economics, prosperity, liberty,
> intellectual freedom, etc.
>
> *However*, it is the case that a productive unfriendly nation is more of
> a threat to "us" than a poor unfriendly nation. (Whoever "us" happens to
> be in this case).

Its true that e.g. Nazi Germany was more threatening to US than some random primitive tribesmen.

One thing to keep in mind though is the relationship between prosperity and morality. Nazi Germany's *evil* policies diminished its own prosperity. This is not a coincidence.

Like they persecuted millions of members of their own productive class. That was bad for their economy.

They also instituted socialist control of the economy, also bad.

Their prosperity wasn't the issue. Their evil ideas were the issue. They would have been MORE prosperous if they'd been LESS evil.

Due to a bunch of appeasement, they were *prosperous enough* to cause tons of harm. But they also gave up a bunch of prosperity to be able to cause that harm.

Prosperity, in general, is good. We were not a threat to the UK during WW2. In fact, our prosperity was helpful to them in dealing with the threats they faced.

> In most cases other nation’s freedom and prosperity does not threaten
> our own (Australia and the US are easy examples), and then it’s fine.
> But if another nation’s prosperity (possibly through oil) threatened
> our own, *and this was a salient threat*, I’d expect the US and
> Australia to react.
>
> Another way to look at this: **eventually the US will become the
> problem**.
> Since the US (like Australia) is not based in fallibilism
> (though maybe has some small ability to correct errors over a long
> time), as we grow as a society both the US and Australia will **need**
> to change, or they will *become* the problem.

Oh so you just mean we'll become the problem if we don't change fast enough. ok....

> *Everything* eventually
> becomes a problem if it doesn’t have a good enough system of error
> correction, and canonical democracy is **really** bad at it.
>
> Note: dictatorships are definitely *worse* at this than our democracies.
> That means they’ll become

they *are* problems.

> problems first, before our systems of
> governance do. However, once the world in general is more prosperous, or
> western countries become even *more* prosperous, these systems of
> governance will *need* to change. I mean surely you agree that they can
> be improved? That there are future breakthroughs with democracy to
> uncover? And that those improvements will be unintuitive but far better
> for us? (In the same way new scientific breakthroughs are unintuitive
> and also better)

Democracies can improve but you have to be careful.

btw one possibility to consider is that the dictatorships destroy the democracies. that's a serious concern.

>>> the preceding paragraph (which lives between "free and prosperous"
>>> and
>>> "president’s solemn duty") reads:
>>>
>>>>> Our individual concerns about protecting ourselves from unfriendly
>>>>> democracies elsewhere typically trump our longer term belief in the
>>>>> benefits of democracy.
>>
>> what unfriendly democracies? when was the last time two democracies
>> went to war against each other?
>>
>> is there any dictatorship in the world we'd prefer stay that way,
>> rather than change into one of mildly unfriendly democracies like
>> Germany?
>
> Well Nazi Germany was a democracy.

no. it was a dictatorship.

-JM

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 17, 2017, at 4:27 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 16 Sep 2017, at 15:19, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> On Sep 15, 2017, at 9:54 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>
>>> On 15 Sep 2017, at 9:15, anonymous FI wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The Dictator's Handbook:

>> more on this in the podcast https://gum.co/EyJnB
>
> I’ve managed to listen to the first 30-40 minutes or so (so far), and while it doesn’t seem like you talk about it that much, I do think I have some responses.
>
> In this case, how would you feel about Iran becoming prosperous? I don’t think it’s controversial to say that *too much* prosperity in Iran would threaten the US. (Note, the quote itself does not mention democracy)
>
> There are secondary arguments here about prosperity encouraging better ideas, and the positive feedback between economics, prosperity, liberty, intellectual freedom, etc.
>
> *However*, it is the case that a productive unfriendly nation is more of a threat to "us" than a poor unfriendly nation. (Whoever "us" happens to be in this case).

productive/unproductive and friendly/unfriendly are **not independent variables**.

> In most cases other nation’s freedom and prosperity does not threaten our own (Australia and the US are easy examples), and then it’s fine. But if another nation’s prosperity (possibly through oil) threatened our own, *and this was a salient threat*, I’d expect the US and Australia to react.

getting wealth out of underground oil requires a great deal of technology and morality.

the only way immoral countries got oil-wealthy was by violence (e.g. stealing oil wells) which the West could have stopped. the West didn't stop it because of due to bad ideas.

such things don't happen naturally. it's our own ideas, which are unfriendly to ourselves, manifesting in the form of rich, hostile countries that we created.

those countries still aren't very dangerous to us. and if they could figure out how to create prosperity (rather than just steal some of it once while the cops foolishly turn a blind eye), they'd be less dangerous, not more.

bad ideas also cause problems internally, which is a much bigger danger. Iran, North Korea, etc, would be easy for us to deal with if we got our act together intellectually and figured out the right things to do. we need moral clarity and we'll be fine.

> Another way to look at this: **eventually the US will become the problem**. Since the US (like Australia) is not based in fallibilism (though maybe has some small ability to correct errors over a long time), as we grow as a society both the US and Australia will **need** to change, or they will *become* the problem. *Everything* eventually becomes a problem if it doesn’t have a good enough system of error correction, and canonical democracy is **really** bad at it.

no. the US allows persuasive discussion and legal reforms. the US can be part of the future.

you misunderstand electoral politics and government systems. democracy isn't there to create knowledge. that is not the purpose of our political system. we create knowledge primarily in other ways (e.g. discussions, books, schools, science, lectures). there's nothing stopping people from correcting errors in those ways.

the purpose of the government is to suppress violence without being toooooo damn oppressive. democracy is a plenty-adequate method for implement reforms AFTER they are figured out. after the knowledge is created outside of electoral politics, and it's sufficient (like persuades 60% of people), then it's no problem to adjust government leaders, laws, etc.

you should view the US government system as an API which is a bit messy, but which you can still solve any problem with if you make the right API calls. NOT as something inherently limited and blocking progress. it trivially does NOT block progress – just go take your free speech, persuade most people, and then the government will be easy to change, it will NOT get stuck in the past.

Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 17, 2017, at 4:27 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 16 Sep 2017, at 15:19, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> On Sep 15, 2017, at 9:54 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>
>>> On 15 Sep 2017, at 9:15, anonymous FI wrote:




> The selectorate theory actually explains *why* democratic nations are more productive, and it’s not because they’re democracies. Rather they’re democratic *because* they’re productive. See [3]

it goes both ways. they chose democracy because of respect for individuals and rule of law (not rule of authority).

put another way: there are underlying things (moral and rational ideas) which cause both choosing democracy and economic productivity.

>
> That doesn’t *exclude* the possibility of a future democracy-democracy war, though. Especially if democracies become unstable due to a downturn in the productivity of the workers or a massive new source of natural resources is discovered. (Again, see [3])
>
>>>>> Democratic leaders listen to their voters because that is how they and their political party get to keep their jobs.
>>
>> this is a blanket statement. but current US politics is a counter example.
>>
>> Trump and many other Republicans have been ignoring the demands of their voters for a long time. a few have lost their jobs as a result, but many others have retained their jobs.
>
> I’d argue that Trump was able to win because other candidates *didn’t* listen to their voters, or underestimated their voters’ willingness to support another candidate. I discuss this idea a bit more in my response to your post on "End states who sponsor terrorism".
>
> If Trump ignores his voters too much he won’t get reelected. [1]
>
> So I don’t see it as a counter-example at all, in fact I think it explains it well.

this reply is non-responsive to what i was saying. it doesn't discuss or defend the statement i criticized, which is "Democratic leaders listen to their voters because [reasons]". i pointed out that sometimes they don't listen, contrary to the blanket statement that they do listen.

>
> Additionally, Clinton (H) did not satisfy her voters *enough* (there’s another question, too: was that ever possible?)
>
>>>>> Democratic leaders were elected, after all, to advance the current interests at least of those who chose them.
>>
>> they are not!
>>
>> they are elected to advance some policies they offered. this isn't about promoting someone's interests, it's about ideas about good policies.
>
>> it's about ideas about good policies.
>
> That would be nice, but when was the last time you heard someone discuss the philosophy of a good policy?

today.

do you mean someone mainstream? Ann Coulter and David Horowitz write stuff like that routinely.

do you mean a candidate discussing it as part of an election? Trump and Cruz both did that during in the 2016 presidential election. did you follow what they said?

Hillary and Bernie did it too, in a twisted way. and Hillary is just now publishing a book which says a lot about her philosophy of how she thinks about policy. for example, she read 1984 and thought the lesson was that people need to trust authority more. that's the kind of wrong philosophy which is behind her policy ideas.

if you want more on the philosophy guiding Hillary's (and Obama's) policies, look up Saul Alinsky. e.g. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2314

> When was the last time there was a good affirmative action policy? Ever? Yet there are affirmative action policies.

because people make philosophical errors. so what?

people being mistaken doesn't mean there's no thought going into it, or no good intentions.

> If we do get "good" policy - it’s not in the sense DD uses the word in BoI, and often they’re not based on good explanations.
>
> I wish it were about good ideas, philosophy, and good policy. I desperately want that to be the case because I think the world would be *so much better* if it embraced that. But people don’t want to be criticised, and they don’t want their political views criticised either. They don’t want *good* policy, they want *their* policy.

no. people are bad at philosophy, objectivity, etc, but the majority of Westerners do want it. tons of people try to think political issues through.

>> they are elected to advance some policies they offered
>
> Yes, and the people who want those policies are the ones that voted for them. Some voters did their research and think the policies are good, but most voters want them *because they like them*, and most voters don’t apply rationality to that. It’s much easier to be self-interested than vote for good ideas.
>
> Why would people not be self-interested in politics when they are self-interested economically?

what does that mean? people are self-interested in one-on-one trading. i don't know what alternative you'd propose. self-interest in individual economic transactions helps ensure mutual benefit. aiming for mutual benefit is how we avoid tons of economic trading errors.

in politics, reasonable, decent people do NOT try to vote to give themselves money. they don't want that. they want things that would be objectively good. they are partially mistaken about what those things are, and partially biased, and partially correct, in varying degrees.

>> good people don't vote for their own interests to be advanced. they aren't
>> looking for win/lose outcomes in their favor. they are trying to figure out what's objectively good and get that.
>
> If you define "good people" as people who already are willing to vote for the best policies, regardless of the impact on them, then you’re right.
>
> But most people aren’t like that. They’re not looking for the "/lose" part of that, but they’re definitely looking for the "win" part of that.
>
> I see it every *day* in modern democracies, or at least Australia’s (and it’s not much different to the US - not PR based, at least)
>
> I can give examples if you want. But it’s not hard to criticise most policies (especially when they don’t come with explanations; they’re just lists of instructions and rules with no reasoning behind them).

you should give examples because i deny it.

to start with, why don't you give some right-wing or liberal examples. that's the easier case. the left is harder to defend so we can save them for later.

>> the large majority of Americans would prefer government policies they're convinced are objectively good over policies aimed at advancing their current personal interests. (these are largely compatible, but it's the objective good they focus on, and rightly so. they focus more on their personal interests when there's a LARGE effect at stake, but they're virtuous enough to be pretty objective about most policies.)
>
> I don’t see that at all. Is there any evidence for this?

the issue is interpretation, not evidence.

as one little example, to get the ball rolling, David Horowitz advocates school vouchers b/c he wants to improve the lives of, especially, youths in bad situations in bad areas of large cities. that's b/c he thinks it's good policy, not b/c he has a son in one of those shitty schools or some other direct personal stake in the matter.

>> why do they do this? because they think it's the morally right way to vote (ideas!), and they care about issues (like which policies are better and which political arguments are correct), and they're comfortable enough not to be desperate to get a handout. they also care about things like *fairness*.
>
> But they’re not rational! How do they know what good ideas look like if they can’t even find them in their own lives?

they do find lots of good ideas.

the West is the best civilization that has ever existed. but, granted, it's not even better and more rational, yet.

> If you were arguing that rep democracy worked with a population of critical fallibilists, I’d be inclined to agree. But most of the voting population is *so far* from that it’s not funny. Every time people get up in a town hall, they’re talking about problems *they* care about. How is that not self-interest?

Ted Cruz won Iowa (2016 GOP primary) while opposing ethanol subsidies. There are videos of him talking to farmers who thought they needed the subsidies, and was capable of making headway in a couple minutes, which goes to show how reasonable and persuadable people are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi5IZ9StVUI

i watched that video when it was new. it has half a million views. it's wonderful.

the guy is initially so hostile and unreasonable, and he turns around really fast. the farmer in the video really isn't too bad a person, he's alright.

and it's such a good example b/c it's about ethanol which is exactly the type of issue where there's attempts to bribe some people with subsidies. that type of politics does exist, but you can absolutely oppose it and win a corn state...

>>>>> The long run is always on someone else’s watch.
>>
>> and yet most Americans care about it anyway, even ones without children. because they think the long run is important. that's an idea they believe.
>
> Again, I don’t think this is true. There are lots of "long run" things we *should* have done.

look at all the global warming crap. that is people (misguidedly) worrying about the long run, not about the effects on themselves.

> An easy example is embedding cryptographic tools in ID cards; in the US - *actually making ID cards at all* (drivers licenses aren’t universal, and aren’t meant for ID anyway, an SSNs are **terrible** for ID). Even in Aus we don’t have ID cards - we defer to drivers licenses or "proof of age" cards.
>
> The benefits of this sort of forward-thought would be massive - because you can *build* on it. This sort of thing is *super* cheap (we’ve been doing it for as long as we’ve had credit cards), easily upgradable (since they expire), and have literally *no* downsides (cancelling a card is the same process).

you aren't persuading me, so far, because you aren't showing any awareness of the other side of the issue. you're just calling people dumb and unreasonable, but you aren't talking about their perspective.

you claim "literally *no* downsides" – but that just makes you sound ignorant of other ideas besides your own. your difficulty persuading people is due to your own ignorance. you didn't make the effort to learn why people disagree with you and address their concerns.

as a quick hint: government ID cards have some connections to government authority, which some people take issue with.

also, as far as cryptography stuff, people don't even know what you're talking about. ignorance and slow adoption of new technologies isn't irrationality or hostility.

and people are, quite reasonably, skeptical of government implementations of new technologies. our government has enough trouble building a healthcare website, let alone getting cryptography right.


Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com