LessWrong 2.0 Reader

IDK, fields don't have to have names, there's just lots of work on these topics. You could start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_anthropology and google / google-scholar around.

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz-L2Ll85rM&list=PL1B24EADC01219B23&index=556 (I'm linking to the whole playlist, linking to a random old one because those are the ones I remember being good, IDK about the new ones).

This model also seems to rely on an assumption that there are more than two viable candidates, or that voters will refuse to vote at all rather than a candidate who supports 1/2 of their policy preferences.

If there were only two candidates and all voters chose whoever was closest to their policy preference, both would occupy the 20% block, since the extremes of the party would vote for them anyway.

But if there were three rigid categories and either three candidates, one per category, or voters refused to vote for a candidate not in their preferred category, then the model predicts more extreme candidates win.

I'm torn between the two for American elections, because:

• The "correlated preferences" model here feels more true to life, psychologically.
• Yet American politics goes from extremely disengaged primaries to a two-candidate FPTP general election, where the median voter theorem and the "correlated preferences" model seem to predict the same thing.
• Voter turnout seems like a critically important part of democratic outcomes, and a model that only takes the order of policy preferences into account, rather than the intensity of those preferences, seems too limited.
• Politicians often seem startlingly incompetent at inspiring the electorate, and it seems like we should think perhaps in "efficient market hypothesis" terms, where getting a political edge is extremely difficult because if anybody knew how to do it reliably, everybody would do it and the edge would disappear. In that sense, while both models can explain facets of candidate behavior and election outcomes, neither of them really offers a sufficiently detailed picture of elections to explain specific examples of election outcomes in a satisfying way. 

Thanks!

What's the ect? Or do you have links for where to learn more? (What's the name of the field?)

(I thought wikipedia would give me a good overview but your list was already more useful to me.)

I am impressed with how far you thought this through. Amend the constitution, including the constitution amendment section

The opposing states in the coalition will simply declare war against the defectors. It's surely worth keeping your own army to keep being a swing bloc.

Yes, I agree it's worse. If ONLY a better understanding of statistics by Phd students and research faculty was at the root of our cultural confusion around science.

I want this to be a board game

I don't know if this would be good for the country, but it would certainly be good political entertainment.

Doesn't everybody always code in a strong time-discount? I have never seen code without it.

There are severe issues with the measure I'm about to employ (not least is everything listed in https://www.sqlite.org/cves.html) , but the order of magnitude is still meaningful:

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=sqlite 170 records

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=postgresql 292 records (+74 postgres and maybe another 100 or so under pg; the specific spelling “postgresql” isn't used as consistently as “sqlite” and “mysql” is)

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=mysql 2026 records