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This is a case of putting political feasibility ahead of technical feasibility. Just because "the people" demand faster horses does not mean you can get to the invention of the car by supplying a series of faster horses.
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This is depressingly common. Politicians are so aware of Overton window issues and the "physics of voting" they keep sacrificing technical plausibility in order to preserve political possibility. Another example of incoherence is demanding that algorithms explain themselves.
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I think we're going to see this increasing divergence between science/engineering ideas of good attacks on complex problems and political ideas of good attacks. There's a reason politicians keep going back to Apollo as a charismatic megafauna reference point for science/tech...
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Rocketry was the last popularly legible sector where you could pose politically feasible goals while conveying a cartoon technical vision that did not create implausible design spaces for the tech community. Everything since: computing, genetics, neuroscience, AI, is illegible.
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It seems weird, but Kennedy's "Moon in a decade" was fundamentally more coherent a technical proposal than something like "decarbonize without nuclear energy to hit 50% emissions target by 2030."
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So what we're seeing here is a 3-stage process: a) ignore the science/tech that's too hard to explain to voters b) promise them impossible things c) attach unrelated side goals that are possible to achieve but don't actually hit the main goals.
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You know what this feels like? It's a "Wall" except with "Science Scare" rather than "Brown Immigrants" as the rallying flag. To the extent the "Science Scare" is real, it's not meaningfully acted upon. To the extent it's an expedient scare, it's a means to other ends :(
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If this is the best democracy can do in a world based on really complex technologies and global intertwingling, then I see why many see democracy (and more broadly, the nation state as a problem solving unit) as the problem. Still there's a bit of hope.
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First there is hope that it is possible to make the *processes* of democracy more scientifically literate somehow, in ways that are not quite as anemic as having toothless scientific committees "advising" politicians. Can we add more teeth to scientific influence over policy?
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Maybe. After all, we ended up in a place where corporations are people, and can influence politics in a very toothy way with money, directly (a condition I am broadly in favor of btw, even if the specific mechanics leave much to be desired...). Perhaps ideas can be people too?
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Second, the practice of lumping together popular and unpopular policy pieces was expedient pragmatism in a low-tech world, but in a complex tech world, is suicidal. I don't think there's anything necessarily either "democratic" there or psychologically fundamental.
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Not quite sure how you retain a democratic spirit in political processes, but I have a few at least theoretical, spherical-cow ideas. For example, I proposed somewhere once that everybody on the planet should have at least a small fractional vote in all elections.
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What is clear is that we're still running political infrastructure based on politicians' ideas of mass psychology that haven't evolved in 200 years, coupled with a technological imagination that hasn't moved an inch since Apollo. We're being governed by 1761 minds living in 1961.
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I don't know what *is* the right action plan here. All I have an idea about is what science+tech+policy experiments are at least worth trying. The problem with GND is that it corners attention/agency in a way that makes those experiments harder.
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Final point, a few are reading this thread like vindication of a Trump-equivalence on . I don't endorse that. There is no comparison between the two. She's just a regular human politician, perhaps more charismatic and principled than average. Trump is a class IV void demon.
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Replying to
Ah interesting. A sort of code-division multiplexing of democracy. This arguably is what representative democracy attempts to do, except for "generalized specialists"... fails because their incentives are to turn populist and solve for social signaling instead.
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