[Waterluvian]

It feels like there’s this weird layer to domestic and international politics where you do a lot of signalling to one audience while simultaneously winking at other audiences that you’re not actually serious. (I can never tell who is getting winked at…)

I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work. The Ned Stark character that is righteous and right and quickly meets the headman’s axe of the game theory and brinksmanship of everyone else.

[Iolaum]

While I agree this is the case, I think this is a consequence of low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse. If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.

I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(

[jolmg]

>> I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work.

> then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.

I think the problem that Waterluvian's is getting at is precisely that WYSIWYG politics is taken as the preferred choice without understanding the implications that make it not actually work. For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.

> If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.

If the quality of those two goes up, hopefully people start employing second-order thinking and beyond and realize that WYSIWYG politics may not be what it seems to be at the surface level.

[roenxi]

> For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.

Have you checked the premise? Usually the waves of fake protect-the-children policies are widely decried, support is fairly thin and the politicians pass it anyway then refuse to revisit the issue ever.

It is like the constant aggressive warfare the US is in - the US public clearly loathes it. Every single election they seem to vote for the candidate most vocally promising peace. I don't think it would be fair to say that the people keep accepting it, the dynamic is clearly that the political class refuses to acknowledge the hint.

[AnthonyMouse]

I think you're talking past each other:

> For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.

Passing a censorship/surveillance bill using the pretext of protecting children is the opposite of WYSIWYG. The true motive is building an apparatus to use to enforce other authoritarian policies and protecting children is the Trojan horse.

If people were better informed about second order effects then that wouldn't work because they would see through the consequences when a pretext is being presented for a bad idea, and then the politicians who attempt it would be more often punished than rewarded. The tactic of lying to people would happen less often because it would be selected against when the number of people who see through you is enough to boot you out of office.

[miki123211]

I'm not sure whether that's the case.

I think highly-educated people have a tendency to overestimate their expertise outside of their field, and especially in different subfields of the field they're expert in. Many (though certainly not all) low-IQ people tend to delegate to experts; although they often don't know enough to choose the right ones.

Look at HN politics. It's still the same as other kinds of politics, just with the issues swapped. We exchange "they're trying to take away our guns" for "they're trying to take away our root access", with basically the same arguments.

[airstrike]

Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.

The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.

[WarmWash]

The more I learn, and the more versed I become with society, the harder and harder it becomes to see what is "good" and what is "bad".

The most confident I ever was that I was "obviously correct" was when I was 20.

[inigyou]

Be careful. Some actors are deliberately muddying the waters of good and bad. For example, vaccines are pretty good, but some groups want you to be unsure if they're good or bad.

[Cyph0n]

Precisely. Bad actors desire complexity because it leads to indifference. The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy.

“Unions can be corrupt” or “You don’t need unions to get your voice heard” is the kind of rhetoric that leads to disinterest in unions over the years.

[jolmg]

It can go both ways. Bad actors can simplify because it leads to indifference, by way of generalizations. "black" = "bad", "illegal immigrant" = "gang member". It's how racism works.

> The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy.

Empathy, yes. Simplicity doesn't normally lead to empathy; complexity does.

[andrewflnr]

> Bad actors desire complexity because it leads to indifference.

This is an extremely dangerous idea without being counterbalanced by fact that reality is often complex and good actors want to be honest about it.

Bad actors desire confusion is closer to being accurate. But bad actors also often oversimplify to rouse people to some politically beneficial but ultimately harmful action.

[inigyou]

I think "unions are always good" is worse than "unions can be corrupt or good, here's how to push for good"

[ragequittah]

This reads somewhat like the older I get the less morals I have. If you have a hard time seeing the wild amount of bad in the world right now you're probably profiting from it in some way.

[jolmg]

Or you lack perspective.

Also, it's not about not being able to see any bad, but some things that obviously seemed correct, stop seeming so obvious.

Reminds me of that clip where a man in some TV show gets slapped by the woman host and he slaps her back. Then a bunch of men from the audience come to beat him up. It's one thing to have the moral "never hit a woman" and "protect women", but if women abuse these views to mistreat and humiliate others without consequence, that doesn't seem right either.

It doesn't seem right for the men to have beat him up for defending himself. They thought they were being moral, but they weren't.

Sometimes moral views can require nuance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4akMaeZ0-k&t=58

[ragequittah]

That is a good example actually. The reason women are typically not as harshly criticized for hitting men is that they are almost certainly physically weaker. It's also the reason why men typically feel safe with a woman walking behind them in a dark alley while the other way around it's terrifying. That's not to say we shouldn't criticize the woman for hitting the man, just that men have the onus to show more restraint in such a situation.

Now for all we know the woman was physically stronger than the man in the instance you're speaking of (doubtful) and hitting her back wasn't that big a deal or even deserved. But as a societal norm we should be dissuading men from hitting women even if they're hit first otherwise you might often get a major injury in exchange for a minor sting. And it's a FAFO situation when you break these norms.

But I find it hard to see the nuance in much of the political nonsense going on right now (which is what I thought you were speaking of). Mass surveillance that doesn't seem to offer any security in return? Obviously bad. Things like measles, the screwworm, and cyclospora coming back due to political posturing or just plain ignorance? Obviously bad. Again I don't see how you could possibly be on the fence about a lot of the politics going on right now unless it's benefiting you in some way.

Not all politics mind you, I'm sure you can find some nuggets of good in there somewhere too. But if you're having a tough time determining the bad things currently as prices for everything are rising and the world is in constant turmoil I want whatever drugs you're taking.

[andrewflnr]

Speaking of perspective and nuance: violent self defense is justified to defend one's safety. But a slap by, let's be honest, a relatively physically weak person is not a credible threat to safety. It's just an insult.

On the other hand, physical abuse of women by men is much more common and dangerous, and there's a utilitarian argument that society should treat it more harshly. Not saying the guys beating up the other guy were moral, but it's easy to argue they were closer.

[Avicebron]

> Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.

Absolutely. Bread and circuses isn't a new idea.

>The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.

Points for the doing good in the end. But it's a rule in hell/serve in heaven issue, if you first need to create hell with your quest for power you have failed the objective of doing good in the end.

[voakbasda]

If you have a binary view, Good will always lose.

Evil can act Good, but Good cannot act Evil. Evil has that advantage over Good that cannot be matched.

This continuously plays out in our political systems. Good actors cannot fight the deluge of evil of their opponents, who are free to lie cheat and steal.

Good binds its own hands. For good to win, it must act with even greater evil. At which point, it becomes the very thing that it tried to defeat.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Evil can act Good, but Good cannot act Evil. Evil has that advantage over Good that cannot be matched.

The assumption here is that being Evil is advantageous. It's obviously advantageous to personal gain, but the relevant thing is whether it's advantageous to staying in power, and then the system you want to design is the one where it isn't.

Notice also that it isn't binary. You can make it harder to be Evil and then have less of it even if you never have none.

[Avicebron]

This is assuming a short game. Defection over cooperation dominates short games, but evil can't trust evil in longer play. And I would hope that the default desire is a long game..

[voakbasda]

For a variety of reasons, we no longer cultivate long term familial bonds or friendships, employment, or even product purchases. If you ask me, the world has increasingly become a series of short games, and the result is an epic rise in distrust of just about everything and everyone.

[Waterluvian]

Tangent: I think this illuminates why I enjoy the “evil” route in many RPGs. My evil party doesn’t have to be moustache twirling. They can pick and choose their evil moments. But a good party feels more constrained.

Rarely a great RPG forces my good party to make difficult decisions.

[Forgeties79]

Funny enough Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I never finished for obvious reasons, actually had a few few moments with pretty thick gray areas where I had to really sit down and think about my decisions. It’s interesting looking back and recalling that mess as one of the only strong examples.

[inigyou]

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain. But there's a third option, too: to die a nobody.

[SV_BubbleTime]

>I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(

Entropy. Things will dissolve enough that eventually someone will make changes. It takes a long time though, this is likely a feature.

[gustavus]

Ive noticed that when people say we need more education or we need to teach critical thinking or something like that often what they really mean is "It is obvious my position is the intelligent one and those who have a different position are ignorant and foolish and if they just knew more, or were smarter they'd obviously really then superiority of what I advocate for over whatever they believe now."

Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)

[NeOchenHorosho]

I'm not gonna make any point about actual politics, but It's a fact that political beliefs heavily correlate with education so there's at least some truth in his point

[kuboble]

But I have also observed educated people supporting some parties, ideas or policies rather mindlessly seemingly as a matter of differentiating themselves from the opinions and interests of uneducated.

[inigyou]

It's correlation, it's not direct cause and effect. The average guess of a group of people is closer to the true value than most of the individual guesses.

[sellmesoap]

This is definitely the position Morgoth wants you to take.

[benshidar]

What if the people who are part of the problem are people who point out the people who are part of the problem? What if there isn’t an actual problem beyond that? Like, things are, you know, just okay?

[Henchman21]

I think it’s more a consequence of the wealthy elites being one hundred percent comfortable with lying to get their way and not caring for the reaction from the rest of us. You know, sociopaths.

[derefr]

I could imagine true WYSIWYG politics, but it would need a very different temporal organizational structure than current politics.

Currwntly, politicians each have a series of meetings over time with different parties (constituents, lobbyists, domain experts, coalition members) and then at some point one of them drafts and tables a law (that's probably already been informally planned for ages among those in the know) and others vote for it (where many of those votes have probably also been informally pre-arranged for ages.)

To get WYSIWYG, every bit of all of those meetings would need to occur in the open. And likely the only way to practically accomplish that, in a “nothing up my sleeve” manner (i.e. to guarantee that there were no meetings outside of the official ones), would be to have all those meetings occur contiguously as part of one long recorded session in one place, with everyone who wants “a seat at the table” needing to operate on that session’s schedule; and where the politicians involved (i.e. those everyone else is there to influence) have a political career that starts and ends with that single session.

In other words, basically do the papal-election thing, or the sequestered-jury-trial thing: lock all the concerned parties (politicians + PAC leaders + lobbyists + etc) in a building together, and don’t let them out until they make a year’s worth of law. (But unlike either of those—record everything! Don’t allow any two people to be in the same room together without a camera.)

[AnthonyMouse]

Only one of the things that makes what you're describing unworkable is that "concerned parties" include arbitrary members of the public. Anyone who can't afford to spend a year sequestered in a room can't so much as write a letter to their representative?

Another is that they would just agree on what to do before the official start of the process. Or learn to speak in code. Or pass notes to each other off camera etc.

The closest approximation that might actually do something would be to require the final version of any piece of legislation to be published a year before the final vote. Then the product of a backroom deal can't be enacted before anyone else has a chance to mount an opposition.

Another would be to make it easier to repeal things than to pass them. A lot of current corruption relies on the misfeature that we apply the same purposely-arduous process intended to inhibit bad things from passing as the requirement to un-pass existing bad things, so then if they can corrupt the entire process once they only have to maintain control of a single branch to prevent it from being rolled back.

[shevy-java]

You are quite right. Some laws have a pre-determined break-point; others are to introduce legislation that is not as severe initially, but will become more severe lateron. Age sniffing is one such case. A few EU countries rushed forward; then they are pulled back by the EU commission. The next step will be restrictive measures for all EU countries - I am certain about that part.

[PunchyHamster]

> I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work.

Well, it wouldn't work for politicians that pick decisions based on what end benfit they get. Would work fine for people. Would need actually honest media tho

[MichaelZuo]

Isn’t it very ironic to post this under a pseudonym?

Which by definition contains some signalling that deviates from WYSIWYG.

[squigz]

Is GP running for political office here on HN or something?

Otherwise I can't really see your point.

[dgellow]

Well, without a public identity we cannot know, they could be running for their local elections

[Waterluvian]

Full disclosure: my name is Chip Dipson and I’m running for TV Remote Comptroller in the living room.

I’m running on a campaign of “PUT IT THE %#^* BACK IN THE SAME PLACE EVERY TIME WHEN YOU’RE DONE WITH IT.”