I see people object to political posts and I typically think: the way they phrased that objection seems wrong to me. I can see specific problems with the thought pattern in the post, and I can see how the political nature of the subject matter may have obscured them from the speaker, but I can't see a single influence directly from political to inappropriate that doesn't pass through intermediate nodes that are flaws in their own right.

"Don't post political posts on LW" is an ethical injunction, which is to say: a political post is likely to have problems, I can confidently predict this without seeing the post or knowing what those problems are; furthermore, if upon reading to post I don't see any problems with it, a much more likely explanation is that this is because I'm missing them due to agreeing with it than because there are no problems with the post. Thus having a blanket "no politics" rule is better then attempting to disqualify political posts by pointing to the specific problems they have, which will only drag us further into mind-killing territory.

If I were writing something like this for LW, I would include something like:

The person which we should consider to have the highest scientific competence, is the person who's log(P(what-happened_1) ° P(what-happened_2 | what-happened_1) ° ... ° P(what-happened_ N | all the stuff that happened)) is least negative. Your scientific competence is measured in bits (or decibels if you like) We should record any gambler's score, and only use the bets of those gamblers with something like the top 0.0001 records to actually determine policy institution.

also, you said:

Don't worry, every source is a fine primary source, even if it is a poor secondary source.

I don't understand, but I'm intrigued.

Advantages of democracy: a) people feel they can achieve their goals through peaceful persuasion, so there are fewer and less violent revolutions b) smooth transition between regimes

P( People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion. I Democracy ) may be greater than P(People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion.), and maybe greater than 50%, but that doesn't mean P(Democracy | People achieving their goals through peaceful persuasion.) isn't less than 0.001. Democracy is a sufficient cause, not a necessary cause, for the advantages you listed, which I agree are by and large representative. In fact, I predict with something around 75% hit or miss 10%, that impressively Bayesian scientists could achieve both, settling disputes by peaceful and rational means, and transitioning policies in the optimal way, better than any publicly elected group of officials, or policies.

A congress man that votes for one thousand policies that save millions of lives and generate billions for the GDP and suggests one hundred of them him/herself, would make just as much money on average as a congress man who votes for one thousand policies that kill millions of people and creates billions in national debt. The wage of a congress man is significantly close to, if not completely independent of their betting, i.e., voting, record. The scoring system does not reward calibration or discrimination; it encourages charisma beyond all else, and also to some degree publicly perceived merit (though it probably plays a smaller role than you would think, specially if you heard reported reasons for subjects' voting decisions). And publicly perceived merit is probably even more independent of log(P(what happened)) for a given official, than wage.

This is the silliness Sciencearchy seeks to correct. To the point of using the actual Log(P(what happened)) to score bets if need be. Establishing tests for success and failure of a given specific policy isn't that hard (try it), but finding a genral method by which to establish the test given any policy is much harder. But if it;s easy in the specific case there must be some general rule we are applying. As an example: to see if socializing health care worked, do some sampling to find the average quality and quantity of treatment, before socialization, and after. If it increased, pay those who bet on in favor, if it decreases or stays the same, pay those who bet against. Only institute a policy if those with "scientific competence" greater than some thresh hold, are betting disproportionately in favor, or against. This would ensure that anyone can bet; anyone with the right skills can gain political power; and only those with the right skills can gain political power. They will not be given any sort of wage besides that which they win, or secondary income. And, of course, it would be completely illegal for third party interest groups to bribe top score players. Any donation given to betters in favor, must be given proportionately to betters against as well, otherwise it is bribery. You may invest in successful gamblers, but if their Log(P(what happened)) shoots down out of no where right after a private investment, they'll be investigated, and will loose their power by virtue of the scoring system threshold. Mind you, this does not establish some goal for the entirety of the council of top gamblers to reach, they can always increase their expected payoff.

My prediction is that as the top record gamblers' log(P(what happened))s get higher, as they do in every other game, the methods they use to achieve this, will look more and more like the scientific method, i.e., selecting from empirically testable hypotheses (predictions about policies' results in this case) with the aid of mathematical rigor (decision theory, and probability most likely).

It seems to me that I establish this suggestion in my post decently, but no one seems to have commented on it positive or negative. Did I leave it out; not make it memorable enough; overcrowd with two many concepts? I'd like to know what you cats think.

It's hard to write the above in a way I feel comfortable passing out to people who aren't LWers. The OP was my first last first draft attempt. One day I'll get around to giving my formal reasons for promoting sciencearchy (if the name sucks I'll change it, i'm just used to it), but for now I think I can give an intuitivish formulation of my position, without the use of log(P(whathappened)) and a general Bayesian background.

It's lesswrong; will you ever find a higher density of Bayesians? We know P-values don't account for P(H|~E), P(H|E), P(E) or P(H). P(E|H) is not enough information to determine your proper probability assignment to H, given you see E, and P(E|H) is all a P-value tells you.

Re: Sciencearchy is a terrible label:

Why not Technocracy?

Wikipedia says:

Technocracy is a form of government where technical experts are in control of decision making in their respective fields. Engineers, scientists, health professionals, and those who have knowledge, expertise or skills would compose the governing body. In a technocracy, decision makers would be selected based upon how knowledgeable and skillful they are in their field.

sciencocracy then maybe

Except for extreme direct democracies,

Some states have provisions for referendums that are variously hard to meet and cover different subjects. So there are many dimensions here, not just a spectrum from from more to less extreme democracy.

I also call democracy and authoritarianism meta-political positions.

False analogy. Except for extreme direct democracies, the populace doesn't vote on specific policies--politicians make these decisions.

Representative democracies with fast pace elections like ours quickly become more direct. And we still would not simply have patients vote on doctors to determine who the best doctor is, we would let their success rate decide.

Thanks for the spell check.

Scientists don't make policy decisions, I think they should be making policy decisions.

I would prefer for people to look up Plato's question in the first place. The same applies to futarchy, I don't like summarizing things in texts I respect when i can reference them just as well, and possibly provide them with a second read. I don't ask plato's question, I say we should ask an analogous question, which I do ask.

Organized science has optimized scientists for being good at working within the academic system, not for making coming up with policy suggestions.

Accademic science has optimized scientists at WINNING! And figuring out what is going on, and on building extremely complicated functional machines! Political discourse optimizes politicians for BEING VOTED FOR, not BEING RIGHT. Science optimizes for understanding. It's the best way to understand starting from where we are. WHat non-science magic are politicans preforming to understand and predict the effect of policies on markets and economies?

I'd much prefer vanilla Futarchy to this.

Please refrain from the political rhetoric. I asked above for feedback to be primarily non-political.

And down vote for this sillyness. Always encourage a young student in the art!:

There are so many nits I want to pick that it's creating a stack overflow in my brain.

Good post. I disagree with one point:

Given this attitude and the fact that you are neither a political scientist nor an economist, what motivates you to endorse sciencearchy?

Conservation of expected evidence: were he a political scientist or economist, one would rightfully accuse him of possibly having selfish motives or biases making him overestimate the value of this proposal. A person saying others are more fit to rule more likely has generally better motives, such as wanting to live under good government.

I don't know yet, that's really the tough one. They could always just be paid off. I plan on looking into how they do so in current betting markets.

You might be right. I'll remove it if I get another complaint.

If the original post was yours, and you deleted it because of the karma hit, maybe read Lost Purposes.

I don't think there is anything wrong with having a low scoring article/comment as long as you learn from it. :)