mitigatedchaos
asked:
What is your opinion of me? And what do you think of my plot to replace congress with a new legislature of political party/think tank hybrids that bet on outcomes of legislation (as outlined in my "The National Delegation" posts, where I still owe squid another post but I won't have sit down access to a computer for a while)?
answered:
- I think it’d be hard to legitimate such a goofy system ex nihilo and I don’t think its performance would be enough to legitimate it in action
- I have a bunch of cavils about specification: I don’t think you could define policy outcomes or contract conditions with sufficient precision to make the market deep or efficient under most outcomes, and I don’t think you can define values with sufficient precision to make that constraint binding
- I don’t think the policy outcomes would be much better, except to the extent that you might fix the system by excluding ‘incoherent’ or ‘imprecise’ values – which would mean the system wouldn’t really be doing what it promises
- I’m deeply skeptical of any regulatory system that’s this hard and finicky – it’s like you’re putting the FDA or the FTC in charge of the whole system of government, and I don’t think market discipline is enough to get federal agencies to behave themselves
- I think its worse than electoral democracy, although that’s not an especially strong belief, and I think it’d underperform purer technocracies or a purer liberal states
on you:
- you put effort and thoughtfulness into your work – that’s good and that’s rare
- I’m too much of a liberal to appreciate your commentary
- you’re very kind and thoughtful, and I haven’t done enough to return the favor
Oh, there appears to be a point of confusion - values are informal, not rigidly specified. And values are not explicitly what is bet on. It’s more along the lines of both parties claiming their legislation would reduce gun crime, as they often do, and betting against each other and with amounts, and “gun crime” is defined as a bundle of metrics to prevent min-maxing. It occurs to me that because so much policy is just flat out wrong at achieving its supposed aims, some fairly large improvements should be possible with even that much of a check on whether it works.
Ofc, there is also the question of what a purer technocracy would look like.