Inadequate Equilibria
A snippet for those disappointed with Labour backtracking on the green prosperity plan.
A few years back I read an interesting little book called Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky. He’s better known for his work on AI, but the book is really about how we (individually and collectively) get stuck with a poor status quo. Politically he’s pretty middle of the road.
His comments on how politicians play it safe because of others’ opinions of other opinions have a lot of resonance when I look at Labour in the run up to the election. I understand why there is such caution, but, aside from being rather uninspiring, I think it risks reinforcing somewhat illusory barriers to action.
Labour seems to me to be overly sensitive to how the right-wing politico-media sector will characterise the green prosperity plan. I hope this is just about getting over the line and winning the election, but I worry that an important commitment is being watered down, even though the leadership no doubt thinks it would both be the right thing to do and affordable.
Anyway, here’s Yudkowsky:
“The... force locking bad political systems into place is an equilibrium of silence about policies that aren't 'serious'.
“[I]f an existing politician talks about a policy outside what journalists think is appealing to voters, the journalists think the politician has committed a gaffe, and they write about this sports blunder by the politician, and the actual voters take their cues from that. So no politician talks about things that a journalist thinks that a journalist believes it would be a blunder to talk about. The space of what it isn't a 'blunder' for a politician to talk about is conventionally termed the 'Overton Window'...
“To name a recent example from the United States, it explains how, one year, gay marriage is a taboo topic, and then all of a sudden there's a huge upswing in everyone being allowed to talk about it for the first time and shortly afterwards it's a done deal. If you suppose that a huge number of people really did hate gay marriage deep down, or that all the politicians mouthing off about the sanctity of marriage were engaged in a dark conspiracy, then why the sudden change?
"With my more complicated model, we can say, ‘An increasing number of people over time thought that gay marriage was pretty much okay. But while that group didn't have a majority, journalists modelled a gay marriage endorsement as a 'gaffe' or 'unelectable', something they'd write about in the sports-coverage overtone as a blunder by the other team.
“...Those journalists weren't consciously deciding the equilibrium. The journalists were writing 'serious' articles, i.e., articles abut Alice and Bob rather than Carol. The equilibrium consisted of the journalists writing sports coverage of elections, where everything is viewed through the lens of a zero-sum competition for votes between Alice's team and Bob's team. Viewed through that lens, the journalists thought a gay marriage endorsement would be a blunder. And if you do something that enough journalists think is a political blunder, it is a political blunder. The journalists' sports coverage will describe you as an incompetent politician, and primates instinctively want to ally with likely winners. Which meant the equilibrium could have a sharp tip over point, without most of the actual population changing their minds sharply about gay marriage in that particular year. The support level went over a threshold where somebody tested the waters and got away with it, and journalists began to suspect it wasn't a political blunder to support gay marriage, which let more politicians speak and get away with it, and then the change in belief about what was inside the Overton window snowballed.”