States Sting Status
We usually take control as a strong marker of status; those who give orders have higher status than those who take orders. So, for example, bosses are reluctant to oversee better paid subordinates, and teens chafe under the control of their parents and teachers, even when their lives are otherwise comfortable.
People care about the form of government they live under not only because different forms of government have different chances of leading to peace, prosperity, etc. People also care about how governments more directly influences their status. For example, in addition to or setting aside our beliefs about which forms of government lead to which other outcomes, I suspect most of us prefer:
democracy to autarchy, as it gives us more illusion of control.
proportional representation, as gives more control over the person we pick
equal votes per person, as otherwise others have more votes than you
the state to be controlled by a group we identify with, so we seem in control
stigma be attached to welfare given to groups we don’t identify with
more regulation of competing high status, to bring them down to us
more support of affiliated high status, to bring us up with as they rise
laws not treat us like children or fools, as that degrades us
I suspect such status issues drive our actual choice of government forms more often than we like to admit.
Thinking along these lines, I was wondering about the status effects of something like futarchy — what if every time the government considered a policy, you had the option to bet for or against that policy, and such bets influenced policy?
Yes, you might still have to suffer the status-reducing indignity of being ruled by foolish policies chosen by clueless folks who in a just world would be considered your inferiors. But you would always know that you had the option to have a large influence, via bets, on those policies, an influence far out of proportion to your fraction of the population. You would also know that you could, via bets, arrange to be paid lots of money when those policies went badly, just as you had predicted. Would this raise your status, relative to only influencing policy via your tiny fractional vote, and then just having to live with the consequences?
Setting aside whether this betting system would actually choose good policies producing peace, prosperity, etc., the question I’m asking in this post is if this betting system might substantially shrink the status sting of the state. Yes this would not fully assuage a libertarian’s outrage at being subject to policies he did not (recently) choose, but would it be a substantial step in that direction?
We usually see control as a marker of status; those who give orders have higher status than those who take orders. So, for example, bosses are reluctant to oversee better-paid subordinates, and teens chafe under the control of parents and teachers, even when their lives are otherwise comfortable. People also hate or love their governments in part because how it makes them feel controlled by others, or in control of others.
More generally, people care about the governments they live under not only because different types of government have different chances of leading to peace, prosperity, etc. People also care about how governments more directly influence their status. For example, in addition to wanting governments that induce other outcomes like peace or prosperity, I suspect most of us prefer:
governments with forms like those of recent high status regimes,
to be part of large rich powerful empires, since those are high status,
democracy over autarchy, as it gives us more illusion of control,
proportional representation, as we then more control who represents us,
equal votes per person, as otherwise others have more votes than us,
states controlled by groups we identify with, so we seem in control,
stigma attached to assistance given groups we don’t identify with,
more regulation of competing high status folks, to bring them down to us,
more support of affiliated high status folks, to lift us as they rise, and
laws that treat them but not us like children, as that degrades folks.
Such status issues may drive our choice of government forms more often than we like to admit. So when trying to design good government, we need to take such status affects into account, so that our designs can be attractive and stable. Thinking along these lines, I was wondering about the status effects of something like futarchy — what if every time the government considered a policy, you had the option to bet for or against that policy, and such bets influenced policy?
Yes, you might still have to suffer the status-reducing indignity of being ruled by foolish policies chosen by dimwits who in a just world would be considered your inferiors. But you would always know that, via bets, you had the option of a large influence on those policies, far out of proportion to your fraction of the population. You would also know that you could, via bets, arrange to be paid lots when those policies went badly, just as you had predicted. Would this raise your status, relative to only influencing policy via your tiny fractional vote, and then just having to live with the consequences?
Setting aside whether this betting system would actually choose good policies producing peace, prosperity, etc., the question I’m asking in this post is if this betting system might substantially shrink the status sting of the state. Yes this would not fully assuage a libertarian’s outrage at being subject to policies he did not (recently) choose, but would it be a substantial step in that direction?
I'm Swiss and you'd have to pay me really significant amounts of money to get me to live in the US permanently. So anecdotally, the opposite is true.
And I know the same holds for most of my peers. Most would work in the US for a year or two, but could not imagine being there their entire life.
It even goes so far that several explicitly rule out top US business schools (personally, I'm looking to get into LBS or Insead, even though I might actually have reasonable chance to get into one of the top three) because their network would be very US biased...
What I meant to say is that it's plausible that the cognitive drives behind Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking and Equality Matching are what motivated the development of Socialism, Conservatism and Capitalism, respectively.
I agree that there's a lot of mixing in practice, but should there be? People hate corporations that are vey authoritarian etc, see Pinker ('The Stuff of Thought') for discussion suggesting that many social conflicts in everyday life are indeed caused by attempted mixing of the different types of relationship.
I think it's a good bet Futarchy will never work because of the status conflict between Equality Matching (the cognitive basis for prediction markets) and Authority Ranking (the cognitive basis for government arms such as the military).
The link you give to integration of Bayes and analogical inference is a link I myself posted in Open Thread 27, it supports my theory. I postulated that Bayes is a special case of analogical inference (i.e. Analogy is more powerful, but it includes Bayes as a special case). If I'm right, some kinds of analogy making should be found to give the same result as Bayesian inference. And that's exactly what the paper shows.
Nice to see LW folks supporting my view. In the thread 'In Defense Of the Outside View', one poster states:
"This whole debate looks like a red herring to me. The entire distinction makes no sense-- all views are outside views. Our only knowledge of the future comes from knowledge of regularities. So all arguments are arguments from typicality. Some of that knowledge comes from surveys of how long it takes someone to finish a project. Some comes from experimental science. Some of that knowledge comes from repeated personal experience-- say completing lots of projects on time. Some of it is innate, driven into us though generations of evolution. But all of it is outside view. The so-called "inside view" arguments are just a lot harder to express by pointing to a single reference class."
I couldn't have said it better myself. If the addition assumption is made that analogical inference is in fact identical to categorization and the outside view (which seems a very reasonable assumption), then the quoted poster above is in effect saying exactly what I'm saying, Bayes is just a special case of analogy.