how do I sign up for your politics

Anonymous asked:

If funding could be secured, it would be possible to start a think tank, because there is a lot of work to be done. These ideas are exotic, they escape the Overton Window by travelling orthogonal to it, but they have to be refined, tested, and experimented with.

The goal would be to synthesize a new scientific art of organizational design and policy incentivization from a diverse group of fields, including political science, economics (particularly behavioral economics), psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. Most existing organizations and politics are running on pre-digital organizational technology, and very few people even think of “organizational technology” as even being a concept.

Various proposals would be drafted, analyzed, refined, and then simulated using human testers (against competing speculative policies) before being refined again cyclically and suggested for institutions smaller than the US Federal Government. To improve efficiency, various competing domain experts would be hired for short periods of time.

Actually improving governance in the United States would require doing things that deeply offend both the Democratic and Republican parties and which are at odds with their ideological pre-commitments. Formation of a political party is right out due to the First Past the Post System which makes success with policies that are only inspiring to the kinds of people that read this blog extremely improbable. Policy advocacy should therefore focus on attacking avenues which are not sufficiently defended by partisan trench warfare, municipalities, and shifting politicians on individual issues through lobbying and electoral guides, functioning as a Special Interest Group.

Until then, one can follow this strange political time travel blog and dream of the future, if one wishes, in addition to whatever political activity one normally carries out.

politics policy anons

More you might like

Anonymous asked:

Assuming I can shatter China, too (for the sake of sidestepping questions of likelihood-of-success, let's make that "assuming I can shatter China *first*"), any objection to me cracking the US into a few more drownable-in-a-bathtub sized chunks?

Drownable-in-a-bathtub is too small for any reasonable national government, but setting that aside…

How perceptive.

That the dominant hegemony is a democratic republic founded on liberal and enlightenment values, human rights, and democracy as ideology has some advantages. For instance, it likely plays a part in just about every autocrat having to pretend to democratic legitimacy. But those advantages are pretty intangible, so we’ll set those aside as well.

And let’s assume a breakup of Russia and India as well.

Sometimes I oppose things not just because I disagree with them on values, but because I think they won’t even work for the stated goal. (Doesn’t everyone?) So a lot of the opposition to American power wants to supplant America with Communism, or Anarchism, or smash it to bits, or dissolve it into global capitalism, or install a world government.

And while often this is based on ideological values about how people should live,

it’s also based on “OH FUCK GEORGE BUSH COULD JUST RANDOMLY INVADE SOMEWHERE AND NO ONE COULD STOP HIM.”

But while knowledge is knowing that America has hegemonic power, wisdom is knowing that that level of relative power isn’t entirely unique to America.

So not only will those ideas, like turning America Communist, be undesirable in themselves, but they will fail to actually abolish hegemony. They won’t even work for that stated purpose that was supposed to justify such a radical course of action.

For someone like me, this is a terrible deal.

So as long as anyone else has a continent-spanning superstate, I and the other American nationalists have no reason to dismantle ours.

But this question posits that a breakup of the other 9 million square kilometer nations has already happened.

At that point, I don’t really need a continent-spanning superstate. It has certain advantages, but the pressing need, to avoid living under someone else’s hegemony, is gone.

And I’m willing to make weird ideological trades. (I may be a lot less pro-immigration than most of the ratsphere, for instance, but there are conditions where I’d be willing to add all of Mexico to the United States.)

It may surprise you to learn this, but I’ve periodically thought about breaking the United States into a new level of “Regional Federalism” to deal with the increased political polarization. It wouldn’t work as well as we might like for that, due to the primary divide being urban/rural, so some other designs might have to be investigated, but I’m not as opposed to the idea as some readers may expect.

So let’s suppose we take the idea of a North American Union. There’s a sort of slider on a continuum of being more like a unified central government towards being a bunch of barely-connected separate nations. We’ll put the slider more towards the latter.

The American states are too small to be effective countries in the way that we’d like, and many of them are landlocked - very unfair! So we break America into 3-6 countries, based on the regions. Each one has some coastline of its own (if 3-4 countries), or else, through the NAU, the Great Lakes Region gets prenegotiated access to the sea.

This gives us a group of countries which each have a power level somewhere between that of France and that of Japan.

Minimum military development spending is pegged by the NAU to some % of the GDP and is shared between all of them. Actual militaries are individual to each country. There is a mandatory mutual defense pact, and a military coordination center, but pre-emptive wars and the like are optional. If Texas decides to invade Iran, New York does not have to pay for it. Outside of this, minimum military % GDP spending is tagged to 2.5%, and NAU members can sue each other if they fail to meet it.

The US Dollar is not abolished, but becomes a basket currency based on the currencies of each of the new NAU member countries. New currencies are issued for the new countries so that their economies don’t have currency problems like the EU does.

The official language of the NAU is American English. Proficiency in English must be taught in every NAU member country. There is no prohibition on adding other languages at the member country level.

The Bill of Rights is kept.

Other than this, since we’re looking for a dismantling, the power of the NAU government is pretty limited. The number of representatives for each member country is not proportional to population.

For the individual countries, I think multi-party parliamentary systems might result in a bit less infuriating dipolar partisanship. However, to be more decisive, each should have a President elected by Approval Voting.

That’s all pretty radical, and it’s more of a rough sketch than anything, but I am willing to make ideological trades with people that are primarily anti-nationalist because of things like the Iraq War - they’re just trades that no one can realistically offer.

Then again, by the mid-century, who knows?

anons asks policy politics flagpost tired north american union

@remedialaction Although I guess I will add on one more thing, regarding my policy proposals not being “innovative” enough -

I’m an edgy centrist, not a far-right reactionary, extropian, or Anarcho-Lumberjack. My idea of a “cool authoritarian regime” is Singapore, which is noted for being successful, safe, fairly open, and wealthy.

I tend to favor incremental policy rolled out experimentally, which won’t break the economy or be non-reversible. I’m proposing things that I think are likely to actually work, which in some ways means they won’t be so different in kind from existing programs. Revolution is, after all, overrated.

It’s true that in the space of all possible political policies, “ease up on zoning laws, end rent control and issue housing vouchers instead, throw on a tax based on expected new infrastructure required, then let the new housing stock roll in” is not particularly radical or revolutionary, but it’s likely to work and if it fails it isn’t likely to fail catastrophically.

It’s still innovative relative to typical American and European politics, but my goal isn’t to be an innovation-maximizer within the absolute space of all political ideas.

politics policy

Ideological Spread with Nationalist Characteristics

I was half-joking when I suggested that I’d use the statue controversy to remark on how to carry out an imperialistic foreign policy.

But I was half-serious as well.

Nationalism is one of the main drivers of imperialist foreign policy, but it is also one of the primary forms of opposition to the same.

Consider, however, an Empire with a different plan - it wants to spread not its people, nor, per se, its culture, but its ideology. (It may not even consider itself an Empire.)

The thing to do with Nationalist sentiments in other countries, then, is to merge and entangle them with the ideology to be installed (or rather, instilled). For each country, an adapted version of your ideology, fit more closely to the local needs and patterns. Not all countries need to be exactly the same. This allows you to deflect some of the popular will away from direct opposition to your imposed form of government.

This is actually part of why Democracy has had what success it has in its acts of imperialism. (And yes, Democracy as an ideology has a bit of a habit of imperialism, though a lot of that has been driven by America.)

How to interweave them?

Take elements of the local culture that are aesthetic or which are not in opposition to your ideology, and make them official and protected. (For instance, you probably want people to be timely, so if being chronically late is one of the local things, you need to get rid of that. On the other hand, architectural style can generally vary without crushing the GDP.) Pick various writers, historical works, and so on. Tie your ideology into the history of the region, as part of its self-narrative. Elevate local historical thinkers that can be described as proto-your-ideology. Build statues of locals that exemplify the positive qualities you want your ideology to represent.

You must create a new national mythology as a legitimization for the new government.

Over time, if executed well, your transplanted ideology will become part of the socially legitimized history of the country and thus gain the protection that affords.

In the meantime, most countries you could conceivably do this in are going to be relatively underdeveloped. Take advantage of the physical security you can manage to impose in order to pursue a long-term program of development.

Borrow a page from Milton Keynes and have the price of the development paid for by speculating on the values of the land to be developed. If you don’t drop the ball on this, the country is going to undergo a 7-10% annual rate of economic growth for some years. Investors would normally be skittish due to concerns about corruption and physical security, but you have the power to calm those risks.

The development doesn’t have to take place across the whole country, but a critical mass is needed so that future development will be self-propelling, and local talent must be trained (in your universities) so that it can continue to operate in the future.

Now I know this sounds incredibly expensive, and of course it is, but the goal here is to turn those countries permanently to your ideology and increase your ideology’s share of total global resource output - and that is, in itself, very valuable.

(Also, your pension funds can ride that 7-10% annual growth as your corporations are able to buy up assets at low prices.)

It also requires a great deal of political will. Will that, in Afghanistan and Iraq, America did not have.

The simultaneous cowardice, foolhardiness, and ignorance of the American political establishment and voters made for a military campaign that was not only highly aggressive, but failed to accomplish all that much for all the blood it spilled.

Something more ideologically imperialistic that sought to convert Iraq and Afghanistan into true, developed democracies, with all the basic underpinnings that required, would have been better. Alternatively, not going at all would have many advantages. Instead we get the worst of both worlds - a willingness to invade without a willingness to see a conversion through to the end, fueled by the naive belief that liberal democracy is the natural state of humanity and will flourish in all soils if it is simply unleashed.

There are, of course, far crueler ways to expand dominion if one has different goals. I will not go over them here. The age of such empires is over, now, and for the better.

politics policy national technocracy shadowed waters

Anonymous asked:

What would be the impacts of a path to permanent residency (rather than citizenship) for undocumented immigrants?

I’m really tired right now, and should probably let this ask sit, but if I do the knowledge of it just resting there in my askbox, waiting, will nag me.

There are a few big implications.

It prevents, limits, or slows attempting to subvert democracy by sabotaging (or ““sabotaging,”” depending on your morality) the immigration mechanism. “Just bring in millions of people who will vote for my party” is a potentially exploitable flaw in conventional democracy which could, potentially, result in an unstoppable feedback cycle.

In this vein, it dis-incentivizes political parties from deliberately bringing in “undocumented” immigrants because they have far less to gain from it.
It also disincentivizes the immigrants themselves from coming somewhat relative to a pathway citizenship, although I suspect most are chasing money rather than political voice.

It risks creating a long-term, permanently-disenfranchised underclass who cannot vote in their own interests. This depends significantly on the implementation.
Relative to current policy, it accomplishes some of the same goals as a pathway to citizenship, but changes the voting demographics more slowly (one generation vs more-or-less immediately). So if you were hoping to reduce criminal activity and exploitation through naturalization, you could do most of that with permanent residency.

Of course, a major part of why there is illegal immigration into the country is because you can exploit them in ways that you can’t exploit the natives - not just because the natives can vote, but because people who violated immigration law have to stay under the radar to avoid potential deportation/etc, and so will have to be much more desperate before turning to law enforcement.

The businesses supporting this out of a desire for cheap and exploitable labor do not actually want these people properly naturalized, because then they’d have to pay them more, so they’d tend to just import more unauthorized labor.

It’s important to remember that a pathway to citizenship does nothing to stem the flow that caused this in the first place, and is thus not a real solution.

Immigration cannot solve global poverty while the rate of new people created each year massively exceeds the capacity of developed nations to take them in.

Only developing the countries of origin economically, such that they are wealthy enough that people mostly don’t want to leave, can truly solve global poverty.

There are also other policy alternatives.

Issuing a large number of long-term work permits (8-20 years) based on the number of unauthorized migrants currently in the country. This would allow some of the same effects of bringing people up to the surface, but without the same commitment as permanent residency or citizenship. However, it is sorta kicking the can down the road.
Allow the individual states to issue a number of permanent residency permits proportional to their population, at their discretion. I have joked about this, but it’s actually an option worthy of consideration.
Implement hourly wage-subsidies for low-wage American workers, but only for citizens. While this is useful for the poor, and may significantly increase their negotiating leverage, it may even have some business backers. Driving down the de facto wages for all non-citizens, who are not eligible for the subsidy, makes coming and staying far less profitable (and thus desirable) for unskilled labor.
Allow more immigration above current regular levels, but all of these additional immigrants must be sponsored and insured by specific American citizens/charitable organizations, including any education they may require to meet basic levels. (aka “if you want this so badly, you pay for it”)

anons asks politics policy

collapsedsquid

the-grey-tribe

One of the weirdest policy proposals is where you put an expiration date on cash, to encourage spending.

argumate

ooh I’ve played with that one, it also fits well with some basic income proposals

obiternihili

inflation

collapsedsquid

All the kool kids nowadays are talking about negative interest rates.

mitigatedchaos

They’re not yet talking about forming quasi-autonomous state agencies that compete for assignment of implementing government programs, with contracts that can be renewed, but

Shhhh, they aren’t supposed to know about it yet. I only know because I’m from the future.

Source: the-grey-tribe shtpost the iron hand chronofelony policy politics the invisible hand augmented reality break

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.

politics policy

learn-tilde-ath asked:

If you would, could you please say some thoughts (even yay/nay/mu) on this policy proposal? : When taking the census in order to determine the number of house seats for each state, people who the state has revoked franchise/voting-rights from (as part of result of being convicted of a crime) don't count towards the population of the state for the purpose of determining number of house seats.

This seems reasonable to me on first reading.

My late night tired concern is that the census might not update the house seats fast enough to account for changes in policy or something.

It could act as a pressure against the politicians to be Tough On Crime, or at least for them to use whatever means they can to try to strip their opposition from voting. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want certain convicted criminals voting until they are, at least, out of prison again.

I may return to this later.

asks learn-tilde-ath politics policy

esoteric-hoxhaism

Anonymous asked:

immigration policy is the equivalent of the state offering insurance for damages to the host nation. not gonna convince progs, might convince libertarian or ancap types.

esoteric-hoxhaism answered:

what

mitigatedchaos

I tried to figure this one out, but I don’t get it either, and I think about applying insurance to everything.

politics policy

Anonymous asked:

Tbh i find your politics inscrutable, your writing style and your self-memery hit-or-miss, but what the hell, when failure costs little, experimentation should be encouraged, so rock on

Tbh i find your politics inscrutable

I mean, my blog description contains the word “Crypto-Centrist”, so I’m not really going to dispute that.

anons asks politics victory for national technocracy 私

ranma-official

theonion:
“SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass....

Source: theonion queue

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

More you might like

Ideological Spread with Nationalist Characteristics

Some Ideas on Political Experimentation