Hi Linch, thanks so much! I’ll reply to your first several bullet points here.
Good point about making the shorter version a separate post. I might do that.
At the high level, how has your opinions on political inclusion/exclusion changed as a result of doing this research? […] Any high-level takeaways [. . .] ?
I don’t think I had very clear/precise opinions on political inclusion/exclusion before this research. But here’s some high-level takeaways/ways in which I changed my mind:
Theory of change/heuristics about what kinds of things drive political progress:
I’m no longer fairly optimistic about value changes on their own when there are other big incentives at play, and I’m now fairly optimistic about value changes on their own when there aren’t other big incentives at play.
I’m now optimistic about looking for clever political strategies, e.g. a policy you can advocate that divides the opposition, or a policy that would spread internationally through a positive feedback loop. (Before, I hadn’t considered this option much.)
Methodology:
My original plan had been to try to predict future moral circle expansion (MCE) by graphing historical trends in MCE, and naively extrapolating them. I’m glad I ended up looking for causal explanations instead, since these helped me figure out when it would be useful, and when it would be misleading, to extrapolate past trends in MCE.
Before looking at these case studies, I spent a lot (~40%?) of my research time reading up on various more theoretical fields that seemed relevant (e.g. psych, IR). They ended up being a lot less helpful than I had expected . If I were to do a similar research project, I’d first look into case studies, and then decide which other sub-fields (if any) would be useful (since then, I’d have a better sense of what info and ideas would be helpful).
I found mentorship (which took the form of weekly memos for and chats with an academic, as well as initially creating a list of readings for each week) really helpful for time management, research design, and exposure to a different perspective.
Over the course of this research, I drifted somewhat from my original research goals, maybe due to a mix of forgetting them, locally optimizing, and letting myself be too influenced by my mentor/mistaking my research proposal for my goals. This seems to have worked out fine, but in the future I’d write out my goals, and regularly (each week?) adjust what I’m doing to better meet them.
My research reinforced my thinking that, for learning about general trends and why things happened, reading from political scientists and economists is often more useful than reading from historians.
I was surprised by the predictive power (especially in Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy) of assuming that organized interests mostly act rationally, with the goal of advancing their own economic interests. This change of mind made me take on board the assumption as a core assumption of my model.
Looking at how similar things happened in many different countries seems to have been helpful for having a better-informed idea of what trends are general trends.
Hi Linch, thanks so much! I’ll reply to your first several bullet points here.
Good point about making the shorter version a separate post. I might do that.
I don’t think I had very clear/precise opinions on political inclusion/exclusion before this research. But here’s some high-level takeaways/ways in which I changed my mind:
Theory of change/heuristics about what kinds of things drive political progress:
I’m no longer fairly optimistic about value changes on their own when there are other big incentives at play, and I’m now fairly optimistic about value changes on their own when there aren’t other big incentives at play.
I’m now optimistic about looking for clever political strategies, e.g. a policy you can advocate that divides the opposition, or a policy that would spread internationally through a positive feedback loop. (Before, I hadn’t considered this option much.)
Methodology:
My original plan had been to try to predict future moral circle expansion (MCE) by graphing historical trends in MCE, and naively extrapolating them. I’m glad I ended up looking for causal explanations instead, since these helped me figure out when it would be useful, and when it would be misleading, to extrapolate past trends in MCE.
Before looking at these case studies, I spent a lot (~40%?) of my research time reading up on various more theoretical fields that seemed relevant (e.g. psych, IR). They ended up being a lot less helpful than I had expected . If I were to do a similar research project, I’d first look into case studies, and then decide which other sub-fields (if any) would be useful (since then, I’d have a better sense of what info and ideas would be helpful).
I found mentorship (which took the form of weekly memos for and chats with an academic, as well as initially creating a list of readings for each week) really helpful for time management, research design, and exposure to a different perspective.
Over the course of this research, I drifted somewhat from my original research goals, maybe due to a mix of forgetting them, locally optimizing, and letting myself be too influenced by my mentor/mistaking my research proposal for my goals. This seems to have worked out fine, but in the future I’d write out my goals, and regularly (each week?) adjust what I’m doing to better meet them.
My research reinforced my thinking that, for learning about general trends and why things happened, reading from political scientists and economists is often more useful than reading from historians.
I was surprised by the predictive power (especially in Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy) of assuming that organized interests mostly act rationally, with the goal of advancing their own economic interests. This change of mind made me take on board the assumption as a core assumption of my model.
Looking at how similar things happened in many different countries seems to have been helpful for having a better-informed idea of what trends are general trends.