6 ms·

Politicians are amateurs. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. Politicians are experts at politics, they can achieve consensus in seemingly impossible circums

by jfoutz 10y ago

Politicians are amateurs. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. Politicians are experts at politics, they can achieve consensus in seemingly impossible circumstances. If you pick a random politician, and ask them to design a transmission, or perform open heart surgery, they'd do as poorly as you or me. Yes, there are politicians from all walks of life, and you can probably find a surgeon politician. In general, the thing they're really good at is politics. It sucks because they're called on to provide solutions to deep problems, with only the skills of enthusiastic amateurs. Manufacturing solved a lot of problems. It's completely reasonable for an amateur to look at history for past solutions to current problems. For reference, the us congress has a panel of 700 or so experts in all sorts of fields to help write policy. This is in addition to each congresspersons's staff. There's something on the order of 2000 people available to write legislation. And about 10000 pieces of legislation written. So each potential law gets a few months of effort. It boils down to a congressperson (probably a lawyer), a few enthusiastic political scientists, and a few economists to shape national policy. It's not that they don't produce good work. They're smart hardworking people. A trillion dollar budget is probably as difficult to produce as a decent compiler. That's the kind of thing we'll see congress try to slap together right after the election. It's not much different than a team of undergrads trying to get their compiler to pass test cases. It's not inherently bad, it's that sometimes problems are really hard, and they should probably be handled by experts. We don't have a good way of collectively picking experts, so we pick amateurs and hope for the best.

white-flame 10y ago
Contrast a politician with a juror. There's no real reason for a juror to focus on anything but the case at hand. They don't have a career as a juror to pursue, yet they're expected to learn about things relevant to the case. There's almost no personal incentives involved (which also happens to be heavily policed) besides scheduling. Now, a politician generally does things to further their political career. They don't research solutions, they're lobbied for them. They do research what they can say to get themselves [re-]elected. They make deals based on their their status and trajectory within their political party, maybe tempered by "the right thing" depending on how much they hold the concept of a public servant. Sure, there's some out there with passion for a particular problem, but that's not the common case behavior. I say term limits on everything. Eliminate career politicians. Huge bills are currently put together without one hand knowing what the other is doing, and in practice things like budget are fudged anyway to keep the machine mostly moving. If career politicians with no real-world knowledge of the represented issues can do this stuff, then a random scattering of people with greater expected slices of real-world experience and fewer expected strings attached can do the same.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  Vaguely related, It would be really interesting to see a government try juries for legislation. Let representatives do everything they normally do but vote. A jury selected from voters in proportion to representatives is convened. The bill sponsors and opponents make their case to the jury. The jury votes. It might be an unmitigated disaster. But, it would be interesting.
  - tdeck 10y ago
    This is how democracy worked in ancient Athens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
    - majewsky 10y ago
      TIL there's a word for that strange political idea that I like very much. Thanks!
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Vaguely related, It would be really interesting to see a government try juries for legislation. That -- random selection -- was the original, and more advanced than ours, conception of democracy. Not for all posts, mind you.
- krakensden 10y ago
  California has not had particularly good results with term limits for congresscritters. The usual explanation is that it empowers lobbyists, who have continuity and expertise. I don't know if it is true, but it's worth considering.
titanomachy 10y ago
Governments employ experts in myriad capacities. Some of these experts achieved their position through actual merit rather than successful politicking. I think many politicians, despite appearances, actually listen to these expert advisers. It takes a generalist to integrate information from disparate domains of expertise and make a decision. It takes a political expert to establish public support for the decision and shepherd it through various levels of government. This represents an idealized picture of government, of course, and may not correspond with the reality in any particular country.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  I agree, but there's an inherent dilution. It's not hard to imagine and expert proposing something really innovative, that slowly turns into "more manufacturing jobs". Each step dilutes an idea down to something that both sides can understand. The final step is generalists convincing other generalists, politicking. Maybe good parts stick, maybe not. I have frustrations. Things work ok, i guess. I don't have a grand alternative.
  - titanomachy 10y ago
    > I don't have a grand alternative. Me neither. It would be better if all sides trusted experts more, but that seems to be the opposite direction from where we're heading. Denouncing experts seems to be a wellspring of political capital these days.
BurningFrog 10y ago
I'd say the core skill of politicians is to get elected. Writing good laws is not entirely unimportant, but it is a much smaller factor. And, as you say, they have experts to help out with that stuff.
- mtbcoder 10y ago
  > I'd say the core skill of politicians is to get elected. In the US, this could easily be mitigated with shorter campaign cycles.
  - krakensden 10y ago
    If you banned campaigning, you'd get a shadow campaign from surrogates.
JDiculous 10y ago
How do we fix this? Here's an idea - direct democracy where one can only vote on a topic that he/she has proven a minimal set of competence in. This could be in the form of an exam on a topic (eg. economics) and/or logic test. The goal is that one should not be allowed to vote on something like climate change without knowing the science and data behind climate change. We need to acknowledge that the world is too complex for one person to know what's best for everyone on every single topic. Our system of representatives is totally outdated now that we have the internet. The beauty of direct democracy is that it removes the politicians. As long as there are politicians, there will always be corruption (eg. bribery). Ideally of course we'd have AI deciding our best course of action because humans are inherently biased, but that's further down the road.
- hasenj 10y ago
  The problem then is it gives too much power to few people. Especially in the case of AI.
  - JDiculous 10y ago
    That's already are problem - power is concentrated in too few people (politicians) that are bought out by special interests. My direct democracy proposal expands that power to more people. You would have the power to vote on issues you're qualified to vote on rather than be beholden to your jack-of-all-trades representative who isn't the most qualified person to be making every decision.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  This is an extremely naive view. The sort of direct democracy you propose will most likely end up systematically discriminating against various groups. >As long as there are politicians, there will always be corruption Corruption is unlikely to go away with politicians, my guess is that it'll be there as long as human nature stays the same. >Ideally of course we'd have AI deciding our best course of action because humans are inherently biased AI can be as biased as the training data you feed it.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
>and they should probably be handled by experts That experiment was tried in Soviet Union. How did that end?
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  Just because something ended badly one place doesn't mean the idea was bad. We have "expert" witnesses, some of whom have very little expertise. That's bad. Being corrupt and getting 'experts' in office or firing 'experts' if they don't provide a politically correct answer? Bad. But it is a lot harder for me to argue that basing healthcare or even health and safety policies on the advice of physicians and scientists is bad. If we are revamping the tax code, it might do us well both to look at how tax code compliance is in different countries at different rates - and also talk to psychiatrists and psycologists to help set it up in a way that gets the most compliance. Talk to poverty experts to see what tax codes could hurt the poor and work on ways to solve that.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  A few things. First, shoe factories not having enough leather to make quota responding by making tiny shoes is one of the most cunning gaming of metrics i've ever heard of. I think that was brilliant. People in insane situations still have great ideas. Second, I reread my post a couple of times. I missed the collective ownership point. Could you quote the line where i said the workers should control the means of production? Third, the US military is getting tanks they don't want. This is pretty obviously dumb, and a clear example of politicians ignoring experts. Finally, no real deep changes are needed. Look at the EU's handling of toxic materials. If something is super toxic, but not really used by anyone, the regulation is pretty light. If something is slightly toxic and popular, the regulation is light. The dangerous popular stuff is heavily regulated. It's the kind of thoughtful, risk aware policy that's pretty rare in the US.
  - burfog 10y ago
    We shouldn't be so sure that "the US military is getting tanks they don't want". It might be true, but the words of people in a military chain of command are controlled from the top. Generals who contradict the president soon find themselves in trouble.
coldtea 10y ago
>Politicians are amateurs. That's what's great about them, because they are there to represent us, and we're all, in most fields other than ours, amateurs. And also because most experts on economy and industry have private interests to take care off and force upon the rest. (Well, those private interests also buy politicians, yes, but they always start by buying or directly employing experts).

by jfoutz 10y ago

white-flame 10y ago

Contrast a politician with a juror. There's no real reason for a juror to focus on anything but the case at hand. They don't have a career as a juror to pursue, yet they're expected to learn about things relevant to the case. There's almost no personal incentives involved (which also happens to be heavily policed) besides scheduling. Now, a politician generally does things to further their political career. They don't research solutions, they're lobbied for them. They do research what they can say to get themselves [re-]elected. They make deals based on their their status and trajectory within their political party, maybe tempered by "the right thing" depending on how much they hold the concept of a public servant. Sure, there's some out there with passion for a particular problem, but that's not the common case behavior. I say term limits on everything. Eliminate career politicians. Huge bills are currently put together without one hand knowing what the other is doing, and in practice things like budget are fudged anyway to keep the machine mostly moving. If career politicians with no real-world knowledge of the represented issues can do this stuff, then a random scattering of people with greater expected slices of real-world experience and fewer expected strings attached can do the same.

jfoutz 10y ago
Vaguely related, It would be really interesting to see a government try juries for legislation. Let representatives do everything they normally do but vote. A jury selected from voters in proportion to representatives is convened. The bill sponsors and opponents make their case to the jury. The jury votes. It might be an unmitigated disaster. But, it would be interesting.
- tdeck 10y ago
  This is how democracy worked in ancient Athens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
  - majewsky 10y ago
    TIL there's a word for that strange political idea that I like very much. Thanks!
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Vaguely related, It would be really interesting to see a government try juries for legislation. That -- random selection -- was the original, and more advanced than ours, conception of democracy. Not for all posts, mind you.
krakensden 10y ago
California has not had particularly good results with term limits for congresscritters. The usual explanation is that it empowers lobbyists, who have continuity and expertise. I don't know if it is true, but it's worth considering.

titanomachy 10y ago

Governments employ experts in myriad capacities. Some of these experts achieved their position through actual merit rather than successful politicking. I think many politicians, despite appearances, actually listen to these expert advisers. It takes a generalist to integrate information from disparate domains of expertise and make a decision. It takes a political expert to establish public support for the decision and shepherd it through various levels of government. This represents an idealized picture of government, of course, and may not correspond with the reality in any particular country.

jfoutz 10y ago
I agree, but there's an inherent dilution. It's not hard to imagine and expert proposing something really innovative, that slowly turns into "more manufacturing jobs". Each step dilutes an idea down to something that both sides can understand. The final step is generalists convincing other generalists, politicking. Maybe good parts stick, maybe not. I have frustrations. Things work ok, i guess. I don't have a grand alternative.
- titanomachy 10y ago
  > I don't have a grand alternative. Me neither. It would be better if all sides trusted experts more, but that seems to be the opposite direction from where we're heading. Denouncing experts seems to be a wellspring of political capital these days.

BurningFrog 10y ago

I'd say the core skill of politicians is to get elected. Writing good laws is not entirely unimportant, but it is a much smaller factor. And, as you say, they have experts to help out with that stuff.

mtbcoder 10y ago
> I'd say the core skill of politicians is to get elected. In the US, this could easily be mitigated with shorter campaign cycles.
- krakensden 10y ago
  If you banned campaigning, you'd get a shadow campaign from surrogates.

JDiculous 10y ago

How do we fix this? Here's an idea - direct democracy where one can only vote on a topic that he/she has proven a minimal set of competence in. This could be in the form of an exam on a topic (eg. economics) and/or logic test. The goal is that one should not be allowed to vote on something like climate change without knowing the science and data behind climate change. We need to acknowledge that the world is too complex for one person to know what's best for everyone on every single topic. Our system of representatives is totally outdated now that we have the internet. The beauty of direct democracy is that it removes the politicians. As long as there are politicians, there will always be corruption (eg. bribery). Ideally of course we'd have AI deciding our best course of action because humans are inherently biased, but that's further down the road.

hasenj 10y ago
The problem then is it gives too much power to few people. Especially in the case of AI.
- JDiculous 10y ago
  That's already are problem - power is concentrated in too few people (politicians) that are bought out by special interests. My direct democracy proposal expands that power to more people. You would have the power to vote on issues you're qualified to vote on rather than be beholden to your jack-of-all-trades representative who isn't the most qualified person to be making every decision.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
This is an extremely naive view. The sort of direct democracy you propose will most likely end up systematically discriminating against various groups. >As long as there are politicians, there will always be corruption Corruption is unlikely to go away with politicians, my guess is that it'll be there as long as human nature stays the same. >Ideally of course we'd have AI deciding our best course of action because humans are inherently biased AI can be as biased as the training data you feed it.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

>and they should probably be handled by experts That experiment was tried in Soviet Union. How did that end?

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
Just because something ended badly one place doesn't mean the idea was bad. We have "expert" witnesses, some of whom have very little expertise. That's bad. Being corrupt and getting 'experts' in office or firing 'experts' if they don't provide a politically correct answer? Bad. But it is a lot harder for me to argue that basing healthcare or even health and safety policies on the advice of physicians and scientists is bad. If we are revamping the tax code, it might do us well both to look at how tax code compliance is in different countries at different rates - and also talk to psychiatrists and psycologists to help set it up in a way that gets the most compliance. Talk to poverty experts to see what tax codes could hurt the poor and work on ways to solve that.
jfoutz 10y ago
A few things. First, shoe factories not having enough leather to make quota responding by making tiny shoes is one of the most cunning gaming of metrics i've ever heard of. I think that was brilliant. People in insane situations still have great ideas. Second, I reread my post a couple of times. I missed the collective ownership point. Could you quote the line where i said the workers should control the means of production? Third, the US military is getting tanks they don't want. This is pretty obviously dumb, and a clear example of politicians ignoring experts. Finally, no real deep changes are needed. Look at the EU's handling of toxic materials. If something is super toxic, but not really used by anyone, the regulation is pretty light. If something is slightly toxic and popular, the regulation is light. The dangerous popular stuff is heavily regulated. It's the kind of thoughtful, risk aware policy that's pretty rare in the US.
- burfog 10y ago
  We shouldn't be so sure that "the US military is getting tanks they don't want". It might be true, but the words of people in a military chain of command are controlled from the top. Generals who contradict the president soon find themselves in trouble.

coldtea 10y ago

>Politicians are amateurs. That's what's great about them, because they are there to represent us, and we're all, in most fields other than ours, amateurs. And also because most experts on economy and industry have private interests to take care off and force upon the rest. (Well, those private interests also buy politicians, yes, but they always start by buying or directly employing experts).