Why do you think improving democracy is intractable? None of the highest priority world problems are tractable.
Risks from artificial intelligence—nobody knows if an AI safety solution is even possible yet that warrants hundreds of millions in funding
Catastrophic pandemics—Preventing/mitigating pandemics is a trillions dollar endeavor. Incredibly costly. How is this tractable?
Nuclear war—Exactly how is this cause area tractable?
Factory farming—Good luck on this cause, especially without the force of an enlightened government to demand change.
Comparing to the toughest problems, how is improving democracy intractable? Of course, tractability needs to be balanced with importance and neglectedness.
Developing strong evidence that some specific reform (ie maybe sortition) could be a real improvement could be done in the millions of dollars range. That could be cheaper than training your LLM. That’s definitely cheaper than fusion power.
What is the value to humanity of learning what kind of governments are best? Even in the short term perspective, the value of an improved government could be trillions of dollars of tax dollars saved. In the long term perspective, every top priority world problem would immensely benefit from enlightened governance.
Sortition as a specific reform might be slightly harder to implement on some political campaign, yet imagine hypothetically sortition yields 10% greater ROI in taxpayer benefits whereas ranked choice or approval voting might yield closer to 0%. Of course we don’t know the numbers, and that’s a huge problem. Ranked choice might be more tractable, yet it also might be mostly useless.
Yet we don’t know, because nobody is doing any testing, there’s no empirics and I bet, there’s no funding.
I’ve written what I think is the most potent possible reform here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HwoSHayLt4zqqeyun/how-to-make-democracy-smarter
That’s an interesting idea and might be a potent reform, but unfortunately I’d put it in the truly intractable category.
Why do you think improving democracy is intractable? None of the highest priority world problems are tractable.
Risks from artificial intelligence—nobody knows if an AI safety solution is even possible yet that warrants hundreds of millions in funding
Catastrophic pandemics—Preventing/mitigating pandemics is a trillions dollar endeavor. Incredibly costly. How is this tractable?
Nuclear war—Exactly how is this cause area tractable?
Factory farming—Good luck on this cause, especially without the force of an enlightened government to demand change.
Comparing to the toughest problems, how is improving democracy intractable? Of course, tractability needs to be balanced with importance and neglectedness.
Developing strong evidence that some specific reform (ie maybe sortition) could be a real improvement could be done in the millions of dollars range. That could be cheaper than training your LLM. That’s definitely cheaper than fusion power.
What is the value to humanity of learning what kind of governments are best? Even in the short term perspective, the value of an improved government could be trillions of dollars of tax dollars saved. In the long term perspective, every top priority world problem would immensely benefit from enlightened governance.
Sortition as a specific reform might be slightly harder to implement on some political campaign, yet imagine hypothetically sortition yields 10% greater ROI in taxpayer benefits whereas ranked choice or approval voting might yield closer to 0%. Of course we don’t know the numbers, and that’s a huge problem. Ranked choice might be more tractable, yet it also might be mostly useless.
Yet we don’t know, because nobody is doing any testing, there’s no empirics and I bet, there’s no funding.