Politics: an undervalued opportunity to change the world?

I am not into politics at all, but I think if you could change the following it would improve the political process. Currently politics seems to be based on arguing your position and gaining status for your team rather than seeking truth and the best policy.

• Politics is the Mind-Killer – Politics is not a good area for rational debate. It is often about status and power plays where arguments are soldiers rather than tools to get closer to the truth.
• Adversarial process - a form of truth-seeking or conflict resolution in which identifiable factions hold one-sided positions.
• Color politics - the words "Blues" and "Greens" are often used to refer to two opposing political factions. Politics commonly involves an adversarial process, where factions usually identify with political positions, and use arguments as soldiers to defend their side. The dichotomies presented by the opposing sides are often false dilemmas, which can be shown by presenting third options.
• Arguments as soldiers – is a problematic scenario where arguments are treated like war or battle. Arguments get treated as soldiers, weapons to be used to defend your side of the debate, and to attack the other side. They are no longer instruments of the truth.

A democracy is only as strong as the people that are people in it. It seems to me like politicians too often dwell on inconsequential, but politically important issues. They do this because voters care about these issues. The thing is, though, that voters are most often laymen. They are not experts. Therefore, I find it worrisome that politicians seem to discuss and change policies in order to placate voters. Obviously the opinions of voters should still matter, but when it comes to where politicians spend their effort and time. This should be based on what will provide the most benefit. I see two ways to overcome this: somehow get the voters more informed or change the political process somehow, this is related to the first point, so that there is less showboating, sycophantism and placation to the whims of voters.

• Privileging the question - questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. Examples are: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed? The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like "should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?" and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.
• Error of crowds - is the idea that under some scoring rules, the average error becomes less than the error of the average, thus making the average belief tautologically worse than a belief of a random person. Compare this to the ideas of modesty argument and wisdom of the crowd. A related idea is that a popular belief is likely to be wrong because the less popular ones couldn't maintain support if they were worse than the popular one.
• Most peoples' beliefs aren’t worth considering - Sturgeon's Law says that as a general rule, 90% of everything is garbage. Even if it is the case that 90% of everything produced by any field is garbage that does not mean one can dismiss the 10% that is quality work. Instead, it is important engage with that 10%, and use that as the standard of quality.

Politicians need to become more aware of complexity and the feedback caused by their policies. Understanding system dynamics would help tremendously in this regard.

• Policy resistance - Frequently, a nonlinear feedback system will respond to a policy change in the desired manner for a short period of time, but then return to its pre-policy-change state. This occurs when the system's feedback structure works to defeat the policy change designed to improve it.
• Goodhart’s law - states that once a certain indicator of success is made a target of a social or economic policy, it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role. People and institutions try to achieve their explicitly stated targets in the easiest way possible, often obeying the letter of the law. This is often done in way that the designers of the law did not anticipate or want. For example, the soviet factories which when given targets on the basis of numbers of nails produced many tiny useless nails and when given targets on basis of weight produced a few giant nails.

Unfortunately, there is good reason to suspect this is much less doable today.

If you look in states that have a decent electoral system like Germany it's quite possible to start new parties that win seats. The only problem is that most of the people who join a new party aren't exactly fit for political action and thus the pirate party destroyed itself through infighting and incompetence.

80,000 Hours has investigated the expected effects of changing the world through party politics.

Summary:

This is a very high-potential, though very competitive and high-risk path that can enable you to make a big difference through improving the operation of government and promoting important ideas. If you’re highly able, could tolerate being in the public eye and think you could develop a strong interest in politics, then we recommend learning more about this career to test your suitability.

in between the end of the Han dynasty and the rise of the Jin, the Chinese population dropped by 4/5ths. The wars immortalized in Romance of the Three Kingdoms ere the deadliest before WWII.

By that logic, the deadliest war in history is the Independence of India, which reduced the population of the British Empire by 4/5. I am not pointing out a slippery slope. I am not saying that you misunderstand your sources. I am saying that your sources are complete garbage.

(There is a separate issue that it is not reasonable to compare the "deadliness" of wars to changes in the carrying capacity. For one thing, a death in war takes place at a point in time, while the carrying capacity is extended through time.)

Sure, but rationalists make shitty politicians. Its a bicycle built for two, not for you. Nerds should aim to be the politician's consultants and advisers, not the politician themselves.

Why is raisin policy important?

Many bad policies are the result of rent-seeking, which can easily be resisted, at the cost of having resources for reelection.

How do you know?

Start here:

http://www.propertarianism.com/reading-list/ or http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/ start with open letter to progressives or gentle introduction

no, we're not all necessarily racists, only some.

http://www.propertarianism.com/ just browse around.

If someone told you that there was a trillion dollars a year just sloshing around and you could help apply some pressure to allocate it more sensibly, you would do it. Therefore, I have a high prior on politics being a reasonable way to change the world, since politics controls huge sums of money and labor, on the order of trillions of dollars per year.

Many people claim that politics is very low-value, but frankly, I'm suspicious of those people, since they are usually pushing a policy agenda that amounts to, "Reduce the amount of assets politics can affect or mobilize by handing those assets over to me and my campaign contributors." This was tried in the Eastern Bloc, to devastating results.

So I tend to think that claiming, "politics is weak, stupid, and low-value, and only for weak, stupid people who can't do something worthwhile with themselves in the private sector" is actually a very political signalling strategy used to directly acquire wealth and power as a one-time purchase, without all the nasty business about repeatedly winning elections to keep the wealth and power.

There are few places, and certainly not the US, where too little of society's resources are consumed by politics.

But therefore, in the US at least, action to remove parts of society from politics can be very effective altruism. E.g., the citizen watchdog group NHLA in New Hampshire that targets corporate welfare and other parasitic programs (e.g. the Drug War). They spend very little money (about 40K per year), but have an outsize effect on policy.

nhliberty.org