Political ideas meant to provoke thought

But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively.

No. You're missing a huge component: values. Political choices are typically between conflicting sets of values or between competing interests of social groups.

Debate rages endlessly between pure capitalists and those who want some socialism thrown in.

What exactly is a "pure capitalist"? This is a strawman frequently erected, but there seems to be a major absence of real people with views that can be described as such.

when we can't take it any more.

Who's "we"? Society is heterogeneous. Some want redistribution right now, some would never want it.

If the average government official is smarter than the average member of the populace, it's potentially a win to have the government make decisions for population members.

Again, no for the same reason. Values are hugely important and you're ignoring them. Besides, government officials have their own incentives which do not necessarily reflect the well-being of the population. And, I hope you have heard that power corrupts..?

Debate rages endlessly between pure capitalists and those who want some socialism thrown in.

That's not a good set up for rational discussion. Rational discussion works much better when you discuss actual policy issues than when you discuss highly loaded catchphrases.

Politics as gymnastics for rationalists.

As something which provokes the worst impulses, I consider it good training as well.

who say people can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves

But they can be trusted to make decisions for others if they're smart? Intelligence doesn't give one knowledge or shared values.

Much of your discussion is flawed because you ignore values. Clippy may be smarter than all of us, but I'm not going to be his sheep because I don't want the universe converted to paper clips. Values matter.

At a certain point we hit diminishing returns for additional innovations

Actually, accelerated returns mean we get more bang for increased innovation each year. This year is always the worst year ever to hinder innovation.

As for giving up on Capitalism, not gonna happen. While you focus on Capitalism, many who support it are focused on a Free Market. We like the Free part, not just the mountains of stuff it helps produce.

So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal.

Only in one-on-one conversations or very small groups. If you try to use politics as a rationality test in a room with too many people, someone is going to fail and get triggered, and in the process they're going to cause everyone to have a very unpleasant evening.

Aren't government officials also incentivised to do stupid things? If so, replacing them by smarter people won't solve many problems.

What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people.

Yes, and the irrationality comes in before the discussion even has a chance. In these kinds of discussions, almost without fail, people take their circumstances as a given, and then ask what set of policies would be optimal. The (mistaken) assumption being that their circumstances are immutable while policy is entirely malleable and controllable. The opposite is true. That is, we have the most control over our own situation, and the least control over public policy (effectively none).

Inevitably, people in different circumstances will have different preferences over policy outcomes, and so the discussion degenerates into people bickering about which set of policies is "best", i.e. everyone tells everyone else that their preferences are wrong (and then they try to rationalize their preferences in order to "prove" that they are the correct ones, and then arguments become soldiers and so on and so forth).

Virtually every single "debate" in politics is dissolved once one questions the assumption above. If we have almost no control over public policy, then is it even worth considering our preferences over them? To illustrate, a question like "should the government raise taxes?" is about as relevant as "should Jupiter be painted blue?" if I can do nothing to effect either case.

I propose that we turn politics on its side. Instead of asking "Given my circumstances, what policies are best?" we should ask "Given the current policies, what circumstances are best?". That is we should be engaging in is sociopolitical Munchkinism. We ought to be studying the sociopolitical system and taking advantage of its patterns and loopholes. The best political ideas are those that most improve the circumstances of a given person. There are many objective measures one could use to evaluate them. That would be the only way to have a rational discussion of politics.

As Taleb points out here it's not even clear that socialism promotes less inequality.

In the U.S., when I look at a room with hotshot businessmen in 2014, I know that the 2024 one will be different (except for businessess subject to bailouts). The same cannot be said in Europe or in places where the state is powerful. And if I look at the bureaucratic and academic establishments, the only people who would drop out of the 2014 cohort are the retired/deceased ones.

Static measurements of inequality are defective (in addition to their traditional lack of mathematical rigor). True equality in income is probabilistic: it requires downward mobility. This should map to opportunity. I quickly wrote down the sketch of what such a true measurement of equality would be like.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIX3AzcHFkaGtORkU/edit

I like the idea of vote copying. With good implementation, it would make entering politics easier and cheaper, just like blogging made story publishing easier and cheaper. Specialization means that there will always be a specialized "political class", but the costs of entry (in both dollars and number of followers) could be significantly reduced. Right now, you need thousands of followers and millions of dollars to start a political party. With a good system, if there are five people willing to follow your vote, you could already have a micro-party.

Some thoughts about implementation:

Public or private voting? The advantage of private voting is that your neighbors can't punish you for voting for the "wrong" party. Even if you are a politician, a member of a party X, it is unlikely that you would vote for someone else; but still your vote is secret. I think this feature is necessary to preserve. So there should be a private vote, which cannot be made public in any way; and an optional "voting recommendation", which is public, and is just an information for other people to read. The voting recommendation could simply be an option, plus a link to your web page where you explain the reasons. This format would allow easy aggregation -- let's say that you "follow" ten politicians, look at their recommendations, and if nine of them agree on something, you vote for it, or if there is more disagreement, you read their blogs and decide.

Your private vote could be an opposite of your public recommendation, which is a feature. Imagine that you live in a fanatically religious community, some vote is proposed, and the religious leader commands all their believers to make a public voting recommendation for some law. You have the option to make a public recommendation with some super lame reasons, to avoid punishment from your community, and then secretly vote the other way round.

Since the votes are separated from voting recommendation, with a good infrastructure you could separate the voting recommendations from your identity. In other words, you could become an "anonymous politician". Just a blogger who recommends this or that, everyone can follow your opinions, but no one knows who you are. Not sure how resistant this would be against doxing (also depends on who would own the servers). You could have multiple profiles, for example the same recommendations but different explanations, for different audiences. Or even different recommendations: one for your religious community, and one for everyone else; there is no need for anyone to know that these two are the same person.

An equivalent of a political party could have one common account; they would have some internal decision mechanism about how to determine their public vote if there is an internal disagreement (they could describe it in the linked blog post, or precommit to keep quiet).

So at the end I imagine something like direct democracy, with an infrastructure that would also allow you to just copy your political party's opinions. For the case of privacy, you could probably discuss the whole thing online, but then you have to go to the voting room to make a vote on paper (to prevent someone literally or metaphorically putting a gun to your head while you vote online from home).

Re: Capitalism.

Even if we accept the premise that socialism reduces inequality, your argument boils down to that we should make the poor a little worse of (relative to where they'd be otherwise) in order to make the rich significantly worse of in the name of "fighting inequality".

In addition to the already mentioned differences in values and incentives when having a government official decide for you, there is also an information problem - a more intelligent person can do worse than you when deciding for you because they lack your local knowledge, both of your situation and your preferences.

Capitalism as Delayed Gratification. You don't "have capitalism" you have a mixed system, wit fairly strong elements of redistribution, and a large private sector that is regulated but not micromanaged. Cranking up redistribution is not a disconntinuous shift, to socialism, as some commentators would have you believe. Cycling between free market-ish solutions and redistribution-ish solutions is an emergent feature of most democracies and therefore does not need to be invented.

If the average government official is smarter than the average member of the populace, it's potentially a win to have the government make decisions for population members.

Let's assume the average government official is smarter than the average member of the populace - of North Korea. Is this "potentially" a win, and for whom?

I think you need to make your reasoning conditional to what Karl Popper considered to be the necessary ingredient for free societies: The ability to remove the government without violence.

I noticed something interesting reading the comments on this thread. I consider myself to be someone who's politically non-ideological (that is to say, I don't identify with any particular political affiliation), and when I wrote my post, I was feeling playful... I didn't have any strong feelings about what I was writing about. Similar to how one might feel if one was trying to figure out the best strategy for beating a video game. However, reading the comments to this post, I find myself getting annoyed with the commenters for the political bias I perceive in them. The emotion I feel is similar to how I felt talking about politics during an earlier period of my life when I would classify myself as politically ideological. Therefore, I propose that the politics "mindkiller" functions as something of a memetic virus, in the sense that if someone starts to converse in a partisan way, others are likely to respond in kind. The quote in this post constitutes further evidence for this position.

Takeaway: Think really carefully before discussing something in a partisan way, especially if it's never been discussed in a partisan way before.

representative sample of ten thousand smart neutral people is plenty.

I can be neutral about politics of Bahrain but I per definition can't be neutral about the politics of the country in which I'm living. Being a citizen of a country means having interests.

The obsession about neutrality in US political discourse is quite a strange thing.

Specialization of labor FTW.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita says in the Dictators handbook: "The difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching."

Defining having a lot of essential supporters as waste leads you in the wrong direction.

Interests are important. If Jane is a well informed rich person, and you are a poor person, handing your vote to Jane might not end in a solution that is optimized to your interests.

Liquid Democracy sounds OK if everyone is equal and all transactions are voluntary,, but those are naive assumptions. I can envisage situations, where, eg, some Victorian style paterfamilias browbeats his family into handing over their votes. Perhaps listening to well informed commentators and then casting your own vote is the low hanging fruit here.

The "be a sheep" voting system is also known as assignment voting.

Your vote redirection idea is interesting, but a simple 1 to 1 mapping may make it just as difficult to find a surrogate voter as it is to research a valid candidate. I've tossed around the idea of a learning system where you could log your preference for multiple issues, then based on those preferences, the system could predict your preference on future issues based on the logged preferences of others. I think a system like that would be a great aid for representatives to use to visualize the current thoughts of their constituents, and could be an intermediate step towards the system you propose here.

Regarding vote redirection in a direct democracy. Straightforward implementation is incompatible with ballot secrecy. This can be remedied by allowing each person to cast two votes: a public vote and a private vote. Redirected votes copy the value of the public vote, but only private votes are counted directly.

It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy.

The idea is called liquid democracy.

As far as practical attempts to implement it goes there's https://makeyourlaws.org/ and Liquid Feedback that for example get's used by the pirate party in Germany.

As far as "be a sheep"; most people are doing this already to some extent. They draw their opinions from a combination of media they watch and friends and social groups they identify with. Directly evaluating a policy can be very difficult, so they instead rely on a network of trusted opinions.

Letting people do it totally passively, however, could be bad. We know that people lean heavily towards default behavior when possible. So if the person you mirror starts deviating substantially from what you expect of them, you will be unlikely to change your preferences in a timely manner.

There's a whole host of other problems with such a system that make its marginal advantages seem not worthwhile.

Capitalism vs socialism debates generally happen without acknowledging that the vast majority of the world uses a relatively narrow spectrum of hybrid systems. Some free markets, some social safety nets and regulations.

Pure socialism and pure free markets have rarely existed at any sort of scale or for any substantial length of time.

The "sheep" approach makes some things much more gameable. Lobbyists could just find people with lots of followers and bribe them (whether outright or more subtly). You could say this happens already and your proposal just makes it more efficient; true, but that's by design. It's supposed to be hard to change the nation's mind. It's supposed to be difficult to turn money into votes. I also worry that this proposal disenfranchises those who are too stupid to use the system optimally; presumably we have good reasons for wanting to live in a democracy rather than a singapore-esque technocracy.

Capitalism: Haven't we already reached the point where we should shift to the left? I mean, it's a continuum, not a discrete jump, but it seems to me that a nation as wealthy as ours has already hit the point where policies like nationalized healthcare, subsidized public transit and a high minimum wage are worth it. (Honestly I suspect most politicians agree with your core point that countries should start on the right and gradually move to the left as they get richer - my view is that there's actually quite a lot of consensus in politics, but we argue about the parts we do differ on, because there's no point arguing where there's already a consensus. So the discussion is not about whether the basic principle is true or not, but about how fast we should be moving to the left right now).

Smart vs dumb: Well, smart policies are smart and dumb policies are dumb, sure. But there are real, extrinsic differences between what government can do (enforce cooperation, avoid negative equilibria, account for some kinds of externalities, function effectively in natural monopolies) and what private industry or individuals can do (eliminate inefficiencies in competitive markets, respond rapidly to change, give minority viewpoints a chance to prove themselves) ; it's legitimate to say that certain industries or services can be more effectively run by one or the other and certain kinds of decisions should be taken by one or the other, and it's legitimate to disagree as a matter of policy over where exactly the line is.