6 ms·

If politicians were mathematicians

27 points by jonp 16y ago

dagw 16y ago
I think the writer gives too much credit to mathematicians and too little to politicians. Politics doesn't look the way it looks because politicians are too stupid to understand your counterargument. I'm sure most politicians are well aware of the logical inconsistencies or fallacies in their argument, but more importantly they realize that their arguments and talking points are a means to an end and not an end in themselves and you don't get bonus points for correctness.
- yequalsx 16y ago
  I agree for the most part but some of them really are dumb. It's power, the limelight, and a ego boost that some of them crave and thus are easily manipulated. Definitely, though, it's true that they make bad arguments because it gets them to their goal. It's not because they don't know that the argument is bad, it's because they know the viewing public largely doesn't know this.
- samd 16y ago
  I can't recommend enough that people watch The Wire. It is especially illuminating on the subject of why politicians and bureaucrats do what they do.
  - thebigshane 16y ago
    I haven't seen The Wire, but I have achieved similar insight from The West Wing. Would anybody agree to West Wing's accuracy (at least relatively) to American political reality?
- chasingsparks 16y ago
  I live in DC. I briefly worked for a think tank whereby I was exposed to a lot of politicians. In general, those that rise are smart (shocker). They manipulate as a means to an end, thinking themselves justified. Unfortunately, everyone is using the same means (i.e. manipulation) leading to some pretty weird systems. Most politicians then fall victim to pursuing their ends relentlessly, even if the landscape has changed so much that an unbiased observer could see it is no longer of value. To be fair, this happens to most ambitious people at some point. The difference being that the non-politician (e.g. entrepreneur) who becomes blind to material changes fails locally in his pursuit while the politician fails nationally.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  This is true, but not the whole story. Many, if not most, political decisions are not determined based on logic alone, but at least partly on values. Because of this, it's possible for two different, rational people to both reason correctly from the same data yet arrive at different conclusions. For example, amongst economists there is no question that outsourcing work or production overseas is a net benefit to the economy. If this were the entire discussion, then we'd all go home now happy. However, there is an additional level of argument that can only be addressed through one's moral system and values, which differs from person to person. Some people would say that although this outsourcing does help society as a whole, it also harms a small number of people whose jobs go overseas, and that in recompense for this benefit to the rest of us, we owe the now-unemployed some help. The truth of that, and the size of any aid that it implies, is not something we can get to through purely rational argument.
  - anigbrowl 16y ago
    I partly agree, but this, like the original article, assumes that politicians act as free agents once elected - that is, vote according only to their own best analysis of the situation. However, most political calculus is colored heavily by the question of how it will play with voters via the media. To take your outsourcing example, it is indeed the case that outsourcing is likely to leave everyone better off overall, and individual negative effects could be mitigated with careful planning. But if a large part of your electorate believes in the lump of labor fallacy, and your opponent's campaign team is happy to perpetuate this mistaken belief while dismissing your attempts to foster local economic alternatives as pork-barrel spending, then the arguments in your re-election campaign are rapidly headed for lowest-common-denominator territory. I made a resolution this past new year to give up my hobby of arguing politics on the internet and have (mostly) stuck with it, by the simple expedient of blocking a few websites whose signal-noise ratio had long since gone to the dogs. I have no idea how politicians deal with the daily tide of incoming phone calls, emails, faxes and so on, beyond hiring thick-skinned secretarial staff. Not that I'm shedding tears for the political class, who in many cases choose to concentrate on the game at the expense of the results, but it's kind of amazing that anything gets done. I don't think it's a problem of scale (eg the size of the federal government); I see the exact same problems at the municipal level.
yequalsx 16y ago
The problem as I see it is that it's hard to form rules to discourage bad thinking and practices. It's not like we can imprison people for engaging in stupid arguments. Else, everyone - myself included - would be in prison. Short of such draconian consequences it's hard to find a system of incentives that encourage good thinking in the long run. It's sort of like the bill being proposed in Congress that would limit lawmakers' ability to be lobbyists. It's a noble gesture but doomed to failure. A congressman wrote the part of the Medicare Prescription Plan that prevents Medicare from negotiating prices of drugs. He's now a $2 million a year lobbyist. If he couldn't be a lobbyist he'd be a 'consultant' or a 'researcher'. It just doesn't work. The essence of the problem is that it's tough to fight apathy, ignorance, and stupidity. Collectively we are easily manipulated. Look at how many people think Sarah Palin is smart. If you don't tackle the issues of apathy, ignorance, and stupidity then you get the current system and no set of rules is going to change this. As voters, we need to collectively focus on the qualities of a candidate and not which party they are in. Is the candidate smart? Does the candidate show signs of loving to learn? Is the candidate willing to say something like, "You know what? I'm not an expert in nuclear proliferation. There are lots of them around and I'll listen to their counsel and make a good choice." Is the candidate able to see through bullshit? We've got it all wrong and in this sense I agree with Gowers. He has a creative solution. In the long run it won't help. Greed, incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity are too rampant.
- dagw 16y ago
  Greed, incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity are too rampant. And unfortunately many of the greedy ones are neither incompetent, ignorant nor stupid. If they where they would be a lot easier to stop.
  - yequalsx 16y ago
    Nice point. I wish I had written that in. That does seem to complete the picture I was trying to paint. Thanks.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Short of such draconian consequences it's hard to find a system of incentives that encourage good thinking in the long run. Decision markets (ala Robin Hanson's futarchy) attempt to do this. In short: we vote on our goals. We then bet on whether Policy X or Policy Y achieves this goal. We select the policy with the highest odds of success (say X). Then anyone who bet on Policy Y gets their money refunded, and anyone who favored Policy X loses money if it doesn't work. Thus, anyone who favors bad policy loses all their money. The main drawback to such a market is that it might not be deep enough; if one bets 1 million dollars on policy "transfer 2 million dollars to me" and causes that policy to be enacted, they lose money on their bets but still make out like a bandit.
edw519 16y ago
tl;dr (too logical; didn't read) Now if it had been punchy, amusing, and wrong, but on Powerpoint with the stereo on, I would have voted for that. Oh wait, never mind.
dkarl 16y ago
Totally backwards in blaming the politicians instead of the consumers/fans of this entertainment/sporting event. If politicians started following his logical rules, the first person who came along and started breaking them would bury everybody else, because the voters would feel alienated and betrayed by logical politicians. If, by magic, nobody in political life argued dishonestly, then the only politicians who reflected the beliefs and the emotions of the electorate would be politicians who were just as poorly informed and incompetent at logical thought as the voters. One thing hypocrisy and illogic buy us is politicians who are smarter and better-informed than the people who vote for them. Sarah Palin sticks out like a sore thumb precisely because she exemplifies the average voter instead of just pandering to them.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
...To make the system more theatrical, each MP could be given a certain number of cards that was less than the number of votes to be held... I'm sure this is a good article, but I couldn't help but think of fizzbin
tokenadult 16y ago
Gowers is a very brilliant man. But he supposes that most human errors in reasoning about public policy are linked to formal invalidity of the reasoning. The human mind is beset by many forms of irrationality. http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852 http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238... http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/030012385X http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog... Research does not suggest that formal training in mathematics does anything to improve the quality of discourse on public policy. Please note that I write this as a teacher of mathematics. I like mathematics and think that mathematical thinking is helpful, but I don't expect it to have much help for public discussion of policy.
steamer25 16y ago
Tangential thought I've had around electoral transparency: If you had (open schematic/open source) electronic voting equipment, you could issue a hashed/random ID on receipt of a ballot. After accumulating a number of votes, the ballot data is published alongside the secret IDs and can then be audited by the respective voters.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  I've had the same thought - voter verifiability would certainly remove a lot of the ability to corrupt the vote. However, my reservation is those who are pressured to vote in a particular way, their imam/husband/abuser tells them how to vote; that way the vote could be checked and so couldn't be consider truly anonymous. If you go a step further and then have the hash encrypted with a one-time pad it's getting too complicate IMO and an abuser could simply demand the pad.

27 points by jonp 16y ago

dagw 16y ago

I think the writer gives too much credit to mathematicians and too little to politicians. Politics doesn't look the way it looks because politicians are too stupid to understand your counterargument. I'm sure most politicians are well aware of the logical inconsistencies or fallacies in their argument, but more importantly they realize that their arguments and talking points are a means to an end and not an end in themselves and you don't get bonus points for correctness.

yequalsx 16y ago
I agree for the most part but some of them really are dumb. It's power, the limelight, and a ego boost that some of them crave and thus are easily manipulated. Definitely, though, it's true that they make bad arguments because it gets them to their goal. It's not because they don't know that the argument is bad, it's because they know the viewing public largely doesn't know this.
samd 16y ago
I can't recommend enough that people watch The Wire. It is especially illuminating on the subject of why politicians and bureaucrats do what they do.
- thebigshane 16y ago
  I haven't seen The Wire, but I have achieved similar insight from The West Wing. Would anybody agree to West Wing's accuracy (at least relatively) to American political reality?
chasingsparks 16y ago
I live in DC. I briefly worked for a think tank whereby I was exposed to a lot of politicians. In general, those that rise are smart (shocker). They manipulate as a means to an end, thinking themselves justified. Unfortunately, everyone is using the same means (i.e. manipulation) leading to some pretty weird systems. Most politicians then fall victim to pursuing their ends relentlessly, even if the landscape has changed so much that an unbiased observer could see it is no longer of value. To be fair, this happens to most ambitious people at some point. The difference being that the non-politician (e.g. entrepreneur) who becomes blind to material changes fails locally in his pursuit while the politician fails nationally.
CWuestefeld 16y ago
This is true, but not the whole story. Many, if not most, political decisions are not determined based on logic alone, but at least partly on values. Because of this, it's possible for two different, rational people to both reason correctly from the same data yet arrive at different conclusions. For example, amongst economists there is no question that outsourcing work or production overseas is a net benefit to the economy. If this were the entire discussion, then we'd all go home now happy. However, there is an additional level of argument that can only be addressed through one's moral system and values, which differs from person to person. Some people would say that although this outsourcing does help society as a whole, it also harms a small number of people whose jobs go overseas, and that in recompense for this benefit to the rest of us, we owe the now-unemployed some help. The truth of that, and the size of any aid that it implies, is not something we can get to through purely rational argument.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  I partly agree, but this, like the original article, assumes that politicians act as free agents once elected - that is, vote according only to their own best analysis of the situation. However, most political calculus is colored heavily by the question of how it will play with voters via the media. To take your outsourcing example, it is indeed the case that outsourcing is likely to leave everyone better off overall, and individual negative effects could be mitigated with careful planning. But if a large part of your electorate believes in the lump of labor fallacy, and your opponent's campaign team is happy to perpetuate this mistaken belief while dismissing your attempts to foster local economic alternatives as pork-barrel spending, then the arguments in your re-election campaign are rapidly headed for lowest-common-denominator territory. I made a resolution this past new year to give up my hobby of arguing politics on the internet and have (mostly) stuck with it, by the simple expedient of blocking a few websites whose signal-noise ratio had long since gone to the dogs. I have no idea how politicians deal with the daily tide of incoming phone calls, emails, faxes and so on, beyond hiring thick-skinned secretarial staff. Not that I'm shedding tears for the political class, who in many cases choose to concentrate on the game at the expense of the results, but it's kind of amazing that anything gets done. I don't think it's a problem of scale (eg the size of the federal government); I see the exact same problems at the municipal level.

yequalsx 16y ago

The problem as I see it is that it's hard to form rules to discourage bad thinking and practices. It's not like we can imprison people for engaging in stupid arguments. Else, everyone - myself included - would be in prison. Short of such draconian consequences it's hard to find a system of incentives that encourage good thinking in the long run. It's sort of like the bill being proposed in Congress that would limit lawmakers' ability to be lobbyists. It's a noble gesture but doomed to failure. A congressman wrote the part of the Medicare Prescription Plan that prevents Medicare from negotiating prices of drugs. He's now a $2 million a year lobbyist. If he couldn't be a lobbyist he'd be a 'consultant' or a 'researcher'. It just doesn't work. The essence of the problem is that it's tough to fight apathy, ignorance, and stupidity. Collectively we are easily manipulated. Look at how many people think Sarah Palin is smart. If you don't tackle the issues of apathy, ignorance, and stupidity then you get the current system and no set of rules is going to change this. As voters, we need to collectively focus on the qualities of a candidate and not which party they are in. Is the candidate smart? Does the candidate show signs of loving to learn? Is the candidate willing to say something like, "You know what? I'm not an expert in nuclear proliferation. There are lots of them around and I'll listen to their counsel and make a good choice." Is the candidate able to see through bullshit? We've got it all wrong and in this sense I agree with Gowers. He has a creative solution. In the long run it won't help. Greed, incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity are too rampant.

dagw 16y ago
Greed, incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity are too rampant. And unfortunately many of the greedy ones are neither incompetent, ignorant nor stupid. If they where they would be a lot easier to stop.
- yequalsx 16y ago
  Nice point. I wish I had written that in. That does seem to complete the picture I was trying to paint. Thanks.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Short of such draconian consequences it's hard to find a system of incentives that encourage good thinking in the long run. Decision markets (ala Robin Hanson's futarchy) attempt to do this. In short: we vote on our goals. We then bet on whether Policy X or Policy Y achieves this goal. We select the policy with the highest odds of success (say X). Then anyone who bet on Policy Y gets their money refunded, and anyone who favored Policy X loses money if it doesn't work. Thus, anyone who favors bad policy loses all their money. The main drawback to such a market is that it might not be deep enough; if one bets 1 million dollars on policy "transfer 2 million dollars to me" and causes that policy to be enacted, they lose money on their bets but still make out like a bandit.

edw519 16y ago

tl;dr (too logical; didn't read) Now if it had been punchy, amusing, and wrong, but on Powerpoint with the stereo on, I would have voted for that. Oh wait, never mind.

dkarl 16y ago

Totally backwards in blaming the politicians instead of the consumers/fans of this entertainment/sporting event. If politicians started following his logical rules, the first person who came along and started breaking them would bury everybody else, because the voters would feel alienated and betrayed by logical politicians. If, by magic, nobody in political life argued dishonestly, then the only politicians who reflected the beliefs and the emotions of the electorate would be politicians who were just as poorly informed and incompetent at logical thought as the voters. One thing hypocrisy and illogic buy us is politicians who are smarter and better-informed than the people who vote for them. Sarah Palin sticks out like a sore thumb precisely because she exemplifies the average voter instead of just pandering to them.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

...To make the system more theatrical, each MP could be given a certain number of cards that was less than the number of votes to be held... I'm sure this is a good article, but I couldn't help but think of fizzbin

tokenadult 16y ago

Gowers is a very brilliant man. But he supposes that most human errors in reasoning about public policy are linked to formal invalidity of the reasoning. The human mind is beset by many forms of irrationality. http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852 http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238... http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/030012385X http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog... Research does not suggest that formal training in mathematics does anything to improve the quality of discourse on public policy. Please note that I write this as a teacher of mathematics. I like mathematics and think that mathematical thinking is helpful, but I don't expect it to have much help for public discussion of policy.

steamer25 16y ago

Tangential thought I've had around electoral transparency: If you had (open schematic/open source) electronic voting equipment, you could issue a hashed/random ID on receipt of a ballot. After accumulating a number of votes, the ballot data is published alongside the secret IDs and can then be audited by the respective voters.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
I've had the same thought - voter verifiability would certainly remove a lot of the ability to corrupt the vote. However, my reservation is those who are pressured to vote in a particular way, their imam/husband/abuser tells them how to vote; that way the vote could be checked and so couldn't be consider truly anonymous. If you go a step further and then have the hash encrypted with a one-time pad it's getting too complicate IMO and an abuser could simply demand the pad.