Stop with the president Zuckerberg memes, you guys don’t know how dangerous memes can be in bending the fabric of reality
Okay, so not joking:
I think Trump can beat Zuck, and I think the Democrats (or rather the party leadership) are currently, uh, clueless enough to pick him. I don’t think the rank’n’files want him.
I do think he’s positioning himself to run. It’s going to be an uphill battle seeing as he’s a white male tech billionaire, and not even a cool one like Elon Musk.
Trump’s going to be tougher to beat than he looks. It depends in part of how much legislation he can get passed and how much of the GOP elite he can shift - particularly during the mid-terms. The Trump base want to use the mid-terms for that purpose.
By the time we get to 2022, I think some of the Democratic leadership will have changed, and conditions will be less favorable for The Zuck.
I put 70% Zuck goes for it, 30% he gets the nomination if he does, and 30% he gets the Presidency if he gets the nomination, for about ~6% chance.
Some Ideas on Political Experimentation
A. Outwards-spiraling iterative development across multiple successive levels.
- First level is the guy that actually comes up with the idea. Naturally, when someone develops a policy, they usually come up with some of the initial objections and work through them.
- The “wisdom of crowds” in some studies ended up being the wisdom of a number much smaller than a crowd. Get 2-5 others to review it and search for holes. Iterate.
- After several iterations, conduct more extensive modelling based on expected behavior.
- The policy is brought to a group of 10-20 people to review and find flaws in. (To get a proper review, incentives may need to reward good flaw-finding, perhaps according to a few supervisors.) Iterate.
- After several iterations, a small “lab-based” experiment is devised to test the policy, approved by some number of the flaw-finders. While this might seem like a toy model, behavioral economists have been able to develop some real findings by just seeing what smallish numbers of people actually do in their simulations. The experiment members should be prevented from suffering any negative repercussions for the providing politically “wrong” answers, and possibly assigned aliases for the experiment.
- Depending on results, go back to 1-4 to incorporate the new data. Iterate.
- Larger experiment with more complex model and more actors.
- Policy is rolled out to a small, real-world group that volunteers for it. Wait some appropriate amount of time to see initial results, mostly to rule out catastrophic failure. Iterate.
- Policy is rolled out to several, somewhat larger groups. Data is collected. Iterate.
- At this point we should have much more confidence in the policy, and can roll it out to a much larger organization, but still something below a whole state/multinational corporation (depending on the policy).
- Continue up/outwards.
Among key factors is that the experiments must have ways for experiment members to act contrary to the wishes of the pro-policy members, or to move sideways within the model as it were. Additionally, experiment members should be rewarded with real-world money to drive an incentive other than just appearing nice/virtuous. To achieve this adversarial nature, the anti-policy forces must be involved in planning or approving the experiment.
A framework of methods for game-theoretical defections (or however you want to put it) could be developed, since in the real world, “cheat and kill the guy” is an option in many scenarios.
While not strictly going to capture every way that a policy could go wrong, this should act as a series of sanity checks for preventing some of the worst policies, and highlight promising policies.
B. Proportional Block Grant Committee.
Have the national government collect some share of national tax revenue for conducting policy experiments. Since most experimental policies would be de facto subsidies relative to other states, issue it to states proportional to some factor like population or size (or maybe population times size). This means all the states are subsidized about the same, at least in terms of the policy spending, depending on implementation.
Use block grants awarded in such a way as to make it difficult to just use the money to offset tax cuts. Generally, give experiments to the subnational governments that most want to attempt them, since those same governments will be less likely to sabotage the experimental policies.
C. Internal migration is an experimental result.
Yes, putting a UBI in a province might result in people migrating to that province to freeload off it. Or it might result in taxpayers fleeing. Alternatively, it might not.
However, unless your country is going to ban emigration and immigration, this is actually important information, as are shifts in jobs, building, etc across the economy so long as your country must compete in the global economy.
None of this will be perfect, but it should be feasible to gather a good harvest of information.
Gun Confiscation Compromise Proposals
1. Guns are indeed totally banned. Swords are now completely legal, and are normalized to the point that if many private-public places want to prohibit them (and don’t have excellent security plus lockers for you to use) they would be considered the weird ones.
2. Eliminationist gun buyback program, at the actual market value, which starts off fairly low and eventually rises towards “have me set up to be a rich man for life” as supply falls below demand and fewer and fewer people are willing to give up assets they know they would never be legally allowed to replace.
3. Guns are indeed totally banned for ordinary people. Everybody now is allowed to hire armed private security with special licensing and regulation – people with said armed private security licences make up around 20 percent of the population, with a pretty even cross section between race, class, etc.
(one of the biggest talking points in the gun lobby is the hypocrisy of politicians who are protected by security, though I suspect that they overestimate how heavy security for politicians below the level of the President is.)
4. The federal government forms the American Home Guard. All gun owners are required to be members in good standing of this national militia, which can be called on in the event of either natural disaster or the invasion of the American homeland. After an initial training period of six weeks and clearance for membership, there is one week of follow-up training each year with a payment of $500-800 as compensation. Membership status must be renewed each year. Guns may be owned and traded, but not in unsupervised personal possession (thus at gun storage facilities) if no valid membership is held.
Various things, including crimes, can disqualify future membership in the Home Guard. Members receive a card that they can carry with them for law enforcement to see when inspecting guns, each year.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.“
I actually really like #4. Done properly, most of the gun people I know would totally love being part of the American Home Guard.
Mitigated Chaos
known for Lack of Familiarity with Soviet History, Accidentally Turning Gun Ownership in America into a Heavily-Armed Boy Scout Troop
Anonymous asked:
Social Democracy With American Characteristics probably ends up looking a lot like Cali does now, and by all accounts that's not a very pretty sight. Americans are just too bad at governing (and budget management especially) for it to go any way but slow death. Still better than full communism though I guess.
mitigatedextras answered:
I don’t disagree.
Thus why Full Communism was described implicitly as having a (much) high(er) risk of “exploding and killing everyone.”
The Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats lack the necessary organizational science and political will to successfully implement the hypothetical post-capitalist society they want, and the necessary cluefulness to overcome ideological blinding and make the necessary ideological sacrifices to achieve and maintain it.
Most of them don’t even seem to have the concept of organizational structuring/mechanisms as a form of technology which must be researched and developed (including with competing experimentation), despite all the rhetoric about how the mechanics of Capitalism drive human action.
It’s being pointed out to me that the Soviet Union did do some experimentation of this kind, and that Socialism has had the built-in idea of “we don’t know what Socialism will look like”.
This didn’t occur to me largely because I have only ever seen “we don’t know what Socialism will look like” used as an excuse not to do any planning against well-known failure modes of Socialism/Communism. (I wouldn’t apply the same level of scrutiny to Social Democracy, as Europe exists and has problems but those problems generally don’t involve massive purges and so on. I just think those attempting it in America will screw it up.)
There was further criticism about “how do you actually do this? because politics,” which is of course reasonable, because politics. But I’m one person, rather than an organization. I do have some ideas on this, however.
Anonymous asked:
Social Democracy With American Characteristics probably ends up looking a lot like Cali does now, and by all accounts that's not a very pretty sight. Americans are just too bad at governing (and budget management especially) for it to go any way but slow death. Still better than full communism though I guess.
mitigatedextras answered:
I don’t disagree.
Thus why Full Communism was described implicitly as having a (much) high(er) risk of “exploding and killing everyone.”
The Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats lack the necessary organizational science and political will to successfully implement the hypothetical post-capitalist society they want, and the necessary cluefulness to overcome ideological blinding and make the necessary ideological sacrifices to achieve and maintain it.
Most of them don’t even seem to have the concept of organizational structuring/mechanisms as a form of technology which must be researched and developed (including with competing experimentation), despite all the rhetoric about how the mechanics of Capitalism drive human action.
@collapsedsquid: Have you ever done a mirror test?
Look m8, that’s just what I’ve encountered in the wild outside the weeded gardens of Rationalist Tumblr and other places.
The Communists and the like I know in real life are all excited about mass immigration, can’t connect it to housing prices for some reason, want to abolish gender roles but don’t have a backup plan if that completely trainfucks the birthrates, and on and on. And Social Justice? Aside from a handful of them, that’s their thing.
A clever plot like “let’s use those quasi-automated investment funds to slowly shift to dominant social ownership of the economy” (even though we should guess that eventually that’s going to reach margins and quit working, but still) is not something I see in practice.
In practice, I see a lot of takes like “rich people are responsible for messing up the housing market by building rich people houses! we should confiscate the empty ones! …what are zoning laws?” or “we need to reintroduce rent control”.
And if you mean “you lack the required abilities to enter power,” well, duh.
One of the things about Capitalism is that it’s cruel, but it can sorta keep chugging along even if you don’t really know what you’re doing. The threshold of competence for successfully implementing it is a bit lower.
To clarify, I’m talking about America, here.
I agree with the anon that they will screw it up.
Anonymous asked:
Tired: dual monarchy Wired: dual monachy Inspired: duel monarchy
Revolutionary Girl Utena with Monarchist Characteristics
Gun Confiscation Compromise Proposals
1. Guns are indeed totally banned. Swords are now completely legal, and are normalized to the point that if many private-public places want to prohibit them (and don’t have excellent security plus lockers for you to use) they would be considered the weird ones.
2. Eliminationist gun buyback program, at the actual market value, which starts off fairly low and eventually rises towards “have me set up to be a rich man for life” as supply falls below demand and fewer and fewer people are willing to give up assets they know they would never be legally allowed to replace.
3. Guns are indeed totally banned for ordinary people. Everybody now is allowed to hire armed private security with special licensing and regulation – people with said armed private security licences make up around 20 percent of the population, with a pretty even cross section between race, class, etc.
(one of the biggest talking points in the gun lobby is the hypocrisy of politicians who are protected by security, though I suspect that they overestimate how heavy security for politicians below the level of the President is.)
4. The federal government forms the American Home Guard. All gun owners are required to be members in good standing of this national militia, which can be called on in the event of either natural disaster or the invasion of the American homeland. After an initial training period of six weeks and clearance for membership, there is one week of follow-up training each year with a payment of $500-800 as compensation. Membership status must be renewed each year. Guns may be owned and traded, but not in unsupervised personal possession (thus at gun storage facilities) if no valid membership is held.
Various things, including crimes, can disqualify future membership in the Home Guard. Members receive a card that they can carry with them for law enforcement to see when inspecting guns, each year.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Anonymous asked:
Do you truly think anyone is going to buy your nationalist hogwash? You blithering buffon, the dual monachy will never succumb to such seditious sentiment! AEIOU!
mitigatedchaos answered:
A monarch is nothing more than the crown jewel worn by the State.
Dual Monachy? I’ve got anons inventing entirely new forms of government right here in my askbox.
It is not even slightly new, and I am a little bit surprised that I did not write this ask.
In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ruler was Emperor of Austria (and all their Central and Eastern European vassals and the Balkans and everything) and at the same time the King of Hungary. These two positions were considered to be fairly independent from each other, and is why so much Austro-Hungarian stuff is “Royal and Imperial” (“kaiserliche und koenigliche”).
What finally broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire (besides “WWII”) was ethnic nationalism, with the Emperors never really managing to come up with a monarchical or civic nationalism as happened to some degree in Germany. Today, few people would propose that all of those countries should be under the same leadership, especially as anything other than a somewhat loose confederation.
Your brain autocorrected. The italicized portion was missing an r, and thus not “Monarchy” but “Monachy”.