Political empiricism (original ideology pls no steal)
How to turn politics into a science
I was talking to someone online and they asked me for my political ideology, so I said something along the lines of:
Idk. I think we should just test political systems before making up our mind on what the best one is.
They then called me a “fence sitter” and to “educate myself” and disconnected.
A fence sitter is a person who would not make a choice or propose any action…
I’M NOT A FENCE SITTER!
Although, my wording made me sound like one, but in reality I knew which political system is best: a system where every other political system is tested by the people. I am not a fence sitter because I have a plan. It doesn’t matter that my plan includes capitalism and communism, monarchy and democracy, et cetera.
Empiricism and Rationalism
If you’re interested in something that’s not overly simplified read this.
Empiricism is the idea that we don’t know anything that we don’t observe.
Rationalism stands in opposition to it, it is the idea that some things are just obvious or can be deduced from obvious things without the need of looking at the real world.
You don’t have to fall into one camp or another, for example, you can be a rationalist about math and an empiricist about physics.
But when it comes to politics, nobody really talks about this distinction! People only care about opinions that can be put on the standard political compass.
It looks like most people are rationalists when it comes to politics, if they have any opinion at all, it’s likely to have descended from what they believe to be morally right or wrong.
Sometimes people make empiricist claims — mostly when talking about things they don’t like — by saying things like, “it was tried and it didn’t work!”, but even if empiricism is useful in tearing down ideologies, I don’t see it used to build anything.
Why empiricism is preferable
Most political discourse is brain-dead because it’s happening between rationalists. Most of your thoughts feel obvious until they are proven wrong, and yet only by testing it in reality can they ever be proven wrong.
Good thing almost every person discussing politics has absolutely no power to put their ideology in practice, so that way they can never be proven wrong by reality.
Let’s check out some real-life examples — keep in mind that when you find out how they turned out, the “why” will seem obvious. Although, that’s probably just hindsight bias.
Example 1: When trying to commit genocide
When they want to exterminate an invasive species governments will issue bounties like: “for every dead cobra you bring us, we will give you money”.
The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
And people have been making the same mistake countless times, not just with trying to kill animals, you can read about that here.
An empiricist would have asked when faced with a similar issue: “has this been done before?” “how did it turn out?”.
Example 2: When trying to decrease discrimination
Whether you think this is caused by police targeting or by the predisposition to crime, we can all agree black people in the USA are more likely to have a criminal record, and that companies don’t want to hire ex-convicts.
“Ban the Box” (BTB) policies restrict employers from asking about applicants’ criminal histories on job applications and are often presented as a means of reducing unemployment among black men, who disproportionately have criminal records.
Half the states have that law, so it can’t be that bad, right?
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who was never told “this doesn’t work”, would you be smart enough to predict it wouldn’t work and the whys behind it? Could you quantify just how much of a difference it would make one way or another? Stop reading and give it a try!
Ok now that you’ve given it a try, let’s see.
Before BTB, white applicants to employers with the box received 7% more callbacks than similar black applicants, but BTB increased this gap to 43%
You can read more about it here.
The explanation is basically that everyone knows black people are more likely to have a criminal record, therefore being able to see that a black person doesn’t have one overrides that prior knowledge, now that I know you’re not a criminal, it doesn’t matter that you’re more likely to have been one before I knew!
So when you’re not allowed to know, you have to rely more on the probability.
Why does relying on probability end up with so much more discrimination? Well if I had a coin that ended up on tails 51% of the time would you make the most correct guesses by guessing tails 51% of the time? The answer is to guess tails 100% of the time. (the proof is trivial and left as an exercise to the reader)
When making guesses, disproportionate discrimination is pretty practical, but even that is a little counter-intuitive.
How to put empiricism into practice
Don’t rely on your intuition, know that policies can backfire.
Do politics like we do with science: control groups, objective measurements, and with all the knowledge of how science can be done badly, like p-hacking.
We should also implement “charter cities” with their own governments to try out more original governments with the potential to turn out good.
And despite charter cities being really hard to try legally right now, colonizing Mars in the future could be useful for trying out new forms of government in isolation from one another until mars gets as saturated with human civilizations as Earth is.
Finally, we can always build “computer simulations”. It wouldn’t be too realistic, but it’s the only thing empiricist nobodies like me can do to add something to political discourse.
I actually made a sketch of a social experiment to test different governments, but I really don’t feel motivated to implement it since I feel like not enough people would be interested…
You can check it out here:
https://froggie.substack.com/p/54c94a49-e6d5-405e-b62c-9b708a7e014f