I also think that EAs haven’t sufficiently considered populism as a tool to deal with moral uncertainty.
I agree that there hasn’t been much systematic study of this question (at least not that I’m aware of), and maybe there should be. That being said, I’m deeply skeptical that it’s a good idea, and I think most other EAs who’ve considered it are too, which is why you don’t hear it proposed very often.
Some reasons for this include:
The public routinely endorses policies or principles that are nonsensical or would obviously result in terrible outcomes. Examples include Philip Tetlock’s research on taboo tradeoffs [PDF], and this poll from Reuters (h/t Matt Yglesias): “Nearly 70 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, want the United States to take ‘aggressive’ action to combat climate change—but only a third would support an extra tax of $100 a year to help.”
You kind of can’t ask the public what they think about complicated questions; they’re very diverse and there’s a lot of inferential distance. You can do things like polls, but they’re often only proxies for what you really want to know, and pollster degrees-of-freedom can cause the results to be biased.
When EAs look back on history, and ask ourselves what we would/should have done if we’d been around then—particularly on questions (like whether slavery is good or bad) whose morally correct answers are no longer disputed—it seems to look like we would/should have sided with technocrats over populists, much more often than the reverse. A commonly-cited example is William Wilberforce, largely responsible for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Admittedly, I’d like to see some attempt to check how representative this is (though I don’t expect that question to be answerable comprehensively).
I agree that populism as a tool for dealing with moral uncertainty has obvious weaknesses (thank you for explaining some of these in detail), but in my view the weaknesses are not large enough for a systematic exploration of this question to be not worth the time.
I also agree that other EAs viewing these weaknesses as too severe would be a good explanation for why this hasn’t been done yet.
I agree that there hasn’t been much systematic study of this question (at least not that I’m aware of), and maybe there should be. That being said, I’m deeply skeptical that it’s a good idea, and I think most other EAs who’ve considered it are too, which is why you don’t hear it proposed very often.
Some reasons for this include:
The public routinely endorses policies or principles that are nonsensical or would obviously result in terrible outcomes. Examples include Philip Tetlock’s research on taboo tradeoffs [PDF], and this poll from Reuters (h/t Matt Yglesias): “Nearly 70 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, want the United States to take ‘aggressive’ action to combat climate change—but only a third would support an extra tax of $100 a year to help.”
You kind of can’t ask the public what they think about complicated questions; they’re very diverse and there’s a lot of inferential distance. You can do things like polls, but they’re often only proxies for what you really want to know, and pollster degrees-of-freedom can cause the results to be biased.
When EAs look back on history, and ask ourselves what we would/should have done if we’d been around then—particularly on questions (like whether slavery is good or bad) whose morally correct answers are no longer disputed—it seems to look like we would/should have sided with technocrats over populists, much more often than the reverse. A commonly-cited example is William Wilberforce, largely responsible for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Admittedly, I’d like to see some attempt to check how representative this is (though I don’t expect that question to be answerable comprehensively).
I agree that populism as a tool for dealing with moral uncertainty has obvious weaknesses (thank you for explaining some of these in detail), but in my view the weaknesses are not large enough for a systematic exploration of this question to be not worth the time.
I also agree that other EAs viewing these weaknesses as too severe would be a good explanation for why this hasn’t been done yet.