(This risk is a greater risk than the risk of >50% of the public advocating for unethical policies out of self-interest, because in expectation, unethical policies in the self-interest of “>50% of the public” would be good for more people than unethical policies in the self-interest of experts)
This seems to have a bunch of hidden assumptions, including both about the relative capabilities of experts vs. the public to assess the effects of policies, as well as about the distribution of potential policies: While constitutions are not really a technocratic constraint on public opinion, one of their functions appears to be to protect minorities from a majority blatantly using policies to suppress them; in a world where the argument fully went through, this function would not be necessary.
The fact that ‘technocracy’ gets named so infrequently by EAs may be a sign that many are advocating for more technocracy without realising it or without realising that the term exists, along with pre-existing criticism of the idea.
While this might certainly be true, the negative connotations of the term “technocracy” might play an important role here as well: Someone who is aware of the concepts and its criticisms might nevertheless be prompted not to use the term in order to avoid knee-jerk reactions, similar to how someone arguing for more “populist” positions might not use that term, depending on the audience.
While I am not sure I agree about the strong language regarding urgent priorities, and would also like to find more neutral terms for both sides, I agree that a better understanding of the balance between expert-driven policy and public opinion would be quite useful; I could imagine that which one is better can strongly depend on specific details of a particular policy problem, and that there might be ways of integrating parts of both sides productively: While I do think that Futarchy is unlikely to work, some form of “voting on values” and relying on expertise for predicting how policies would affect values still appears appealing, especially if experts’ incentives can be designed to clearly favor prediction accuracy, while avoiding issues with self-fulfilling prophecies.
Thanks for pointing out the assumptions. I was aware of them but thought that my statement was true despite them, and didn’t want to lengthen the post too much. In the future I will add assumptions like these as a footnote, so that people who disagree on the assumptions can think about how that should affect their views on the post as a whole.
I agree that the negative connotations of ‘technocracy’ is probably a good explanation of why proponents of expert-opinion based policy don’t use the word that often.
This seems to have a bunch of hidden assumptions, including both about the relative capabilities of experts vs. the public to assess the effects of policies, as well as about the distribution of potential policies: While constitutions are not really a technocratic constraint on public opinion, one of their functions appears to be to protect minorities from a majority blatantly using policies to suppress them; in a world where the argument fully went through, this function would not be necessary.
While this might certainly be true, the negative connotations of the term “technocracy” might play an important role here as well: Someone who is aware of the concepts and its criticisms might nevertheless be prompted not to use the term in order to avoid knee-jerk reactions, similar to how someone arguing for more “populist” positions might not use that term, depending on the audience.
While I am not sure I agree about the strong language regarding urgent priorities, and would also like to find more neutral terms for both sides, I agree that a better understanding of the balance between expert-driven policy and public opinion would be quite useful; I could imagine that which one is better can strongly depend on specific details of a particular policy problem, and that there might be ways of integrating parts of both sides productively: While I do think that Futarchy is unlikely to work, some form of “voting on values” and relying on expertise for predicting how policies would affect values still appears appealing, especially if experts’ incentives can be designed to clearly favor prediction accuracy, while avoiding issues with self-fulfilling prophecies.
Thanks for pointing out the assumptions. I was aware of them but thought that my statement was true despite them, and didn’t want to lengthen the post too much. In the future I will add assumptions like these as a footnote, so that people who disagree on the assumptions can think about how that should affect their views on the post as a whole.
I agree that the negative connotations of ‘technocracy’ is probably a good explanation of why proponents of expert-opinion based policy don’t use the word that often.