Three methods of attaining change

post by Stefan_Schubert · 2014-08-16T15:38:45.743Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 10 comments

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Say that you want to change some social or political institution: the educational system, the monetary system, research on AGI safety, or what not. When trying to reach this goal, you may use one of the following broad strategies (or some combination of them):

1) You may directly try to lobby (i.e. influence) politicians to implement this change, or try to influence voters to vote for parties that promise to implement these changes. 

2) You may try to build an alternative system and hope that it eventually becomes so popular so that it replaces the existing system.

3) You may try to develop tools that a) appeal to users of existing systems and b) whose widespread use is bound to change those existing systems.

Let me give some examples of what I mean. Trying to persuade politicians that we should replace conventional currencies by a private currency or, for that matter, starting a pro-Bitcoin party, fall under 1), whereas starting a private currency and hope that it spreads falls under 2). (This post was inspired by a great comment by Gunnar Zarncke on precisely this topic. I take it that he was there talking of strategy 2.) Similarly, trying to lobby politicians to reform the academia falls under 1) whereas starting new research institutions which use new and hopefully more effective methods falls under 2). I take it that this is what, e.g. Leverage Research is trying to do, in part. Similarly, libertarians who vote for Ron Paul are taking the first course, while at least one possible motivation for the Seasteading Institute is to construct an alternative system that proves to be more efficient than existing governments.

Efficient Voting Advice Applications (VAA's), which advice you to vote on the basis of your views on different policy matters, can be an example of 3) (they are discussed here). Suppose that voters started to use them on a grand scale. This could potentially force politicians to adhere very closely to the views of the voters on each particular issue, since if you failed to do this you would stand little chance of winning. This may or may not be a good thing, but the point is that it would be a change that would not be caused by lobbying of politicians or by building an alternative system, but simply by constructing a tool whose widespread use could change the existing system.

Another similar tool is reputation or user review systems. Suppose that you're dissatisfied with the general standards of some institution: say university education, medical care, or what not. You may attain this by lobbying politicians to implement new regulations intended to ensure quality (1), or by starting your own, superior, universities or hospitals (2), hoping that others will follow. Another method is, however, to create a reliable reputation/review system which, if they became widely used, would guide students and patients to the best universities and hospitals, thereby incentivizing to improve.

Now of course, when you're trying to get people to use such review systems, you are, in effect, building an evaluation system that competes with existing systems (e.g. the Guardian university ranking), so on one level you are using the second strategy. Your ultimate goal is, however, to create better universities, to which better evaluation systems, is just a means (as a tool). Hence you're following the third strategy here, in my terms.

Strategy 1) is of course a "statist" one, since what you're doing here is that you're trying to get the government to change the institution in question for you. Strategies 2) and 3) are, in contrast, both "non-statist", since when you use them you're not directly trying to implement the change through the political system. Hence libertarians and other anti-statists should prefer them.

My hunch is that when people are trying to change things, many of them unthinkingly go for 1), even regarding issues where it is unlikely that they are going to succeed that way. (For instance, it seems to me that advocates for direct democracy who try to persuade voters to vote for direct democratic parties are unlikely to succeed, but that widespread of VAA's might get us considerably closer to their ideal, and that they therefore should opt for the third strategy.) A plausible explanation of this is availability bias; our tendency to focus on what we most often see around us. Attempts to change social institutions through politics get a lot of attention, which makes people think of this strategy first. Even though this strategy is often efficient, I'd guess it is, for this reason, generally overused and that people sometimes instead should go for 2) or 3). (Possibly, Europeans have an even stronger bias in favour of this strategy than Americans.)

I also suspect, though, that people go for 2) a bit too often relative to 3). I think that people find it appealing, for its own sake, to create an entirely alternatively structure. If you're a perfectionist, it might be satisfying to see what you consider "the perfect institution", even if it is very small and has little impact on society. Also, sometimes small groups of devotees flock to these alternatives, and a strong group identity is therefore created. Moreover, I think that availability bias may play a role here, also. Even though this sort of strategy gets less attention than lobbying, most people know what it is. It is quite clear what it means to do something like this, and being part of a project like this therefore gives you a clear identity. For these reasons, I think that we might sometimes fool ourselves into believing that these alternative structures are more likely to be succesful than they actually are.

Conversely, people might be biased against the third strategy because it's less obvious. Also, it has perhaps something vaguely manipulative over it which might bias idealistic people against it. What you're typically trying to do is to get people to use a tool (say VAA's) a side-effect of which is the change you wish to attain (in this case, correspondence between voters' views and actual policies). I don't think that this kind of manipulation is necessarily vicious (but it would need to be discussed on a case-by-case-basis) but the point is that people tend to think that it is. Also, even those who don't think that it is manipulative in an unethical sense would still think that it is somehow "unheroic". Starting your own environmental party or creating your own artifical libertarian island clearly has something heroic over it, but developing efficient VAA's, which as a side-effect changes the political landscape, does not.

I'd thus argue that people should start looking more closely at the third strategy. A group that does use a strategy similar to this is of course for-profit companies. They try to analyze what products would appeal to people, and in so doing, carefully consider how existing institutions shape people's preferences. For instance, companies like Uber, AirBnB and LinkedIn have been succesful because they realized that given the structure of the taxi, the hotel and the recruitment businesses, their products would be appealing.

Of course, these companies primary goal, profit, is very different from the political goals I'm talking about here. At the same time, I think it is useful to compare the two cases. I think that generally, when we're trying to attain political change, we're not "actually trying" (in CFAR's terminology) as hard as we do when we're trying to maximize profit . It is very easy to fall into a mode where you're focusing on making symbolic gestures (which express your identity) rather than on trying to change things in politics. (This is, in effect, what many traditional charities are doing, if the EA movement is right.)

Instead, we should think as hard as profit-maximizing companies what new tools are likely to catch on. Any kind of tools could in principle be used, but the ones that seem most obvious are various kind of social media and other internet based tools (such as those mentioned in this post). The technical progress gives us enormous opportunities to costruct new tools that could re-shape people's behaviour in a way that would impact existing social and political institutions on a large scale.

Developing such tools is not easy. Even very succesful companies again and again fail to predict what new products will appeal to people. Not the least, you need a profound understanding of human psychology in order to succeed. That said, political organizations have certain advantages visavi for-profit companies. More often than not, they might develop ideas publically, whereas for-profit companies often have to keep them secret until they product is launched. This facilitates wisdom of the crowd-reasoning, where many different kinds of people come up with solutions together. Such methods can, in my opinion, be very powerful.

 

Any input regarding, e.g. the taxonomy of methods, my speculations about biases, and, in particular, examples of institution changing tools are welcome. I'm also interested in comments on efficient methods for coming up with useful tools (e.g. tests of them). Finally, if anything's unclear I'd be happy to provide clarifications (it's a very complex topic).

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