I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?

We're missing guardrails to allow safe experimentation and we're missing institutions to provide affordances.

I think the difficult bit is figuring out how to seperate the goodness of centralized decision shaping and the badness of centralized power accumulation.

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rawgabbit 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In the U.S. federal system, states often act as policy test sites. A state may try a new law. Other states may copy it. Sometimes Congress later turns a state model into federal law. Eg, unemployment insurance started as Wisconsin program.

The answer to your question I believe is that politics are no longer local. Instead politicians are punished if they don’t mimic the daily talking points from the national committee. That is politics is no longer about solving real problems but is about who swears unswerving loyalty to the party ideology.

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JuniperMesos 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?

Often, the reason is that some constituency, possibly a small one, that strongly benefits from the existing status quo, actively works against the political experiment using the judicial system; and the rest of the electorate doesn't care enough to fight them effectively to make the experiment possible.

This is actually a problem of decentralization, not of centralization. A stronger central planner would be able to just crush a small group of concerned citizens who are independently organizing to fight a political experiment that impacts them, and do that experiment anyway. This is a good thing if you expect that the political experiment is just fucking over some innocent people for no reason; and it's a bad thing if you think that the small, dedicated group of activists are actually rent-seekers in some sense who are benefiting themselves and making everyone else in society slightly and diffusely worse off.

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nilirl 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That's fine if they're benefiting from the status quo, that decision making should be left to those in-context.

The political experiments should be chosen and driven by small units in order to be safely contained.

Planning shouldn't be a top-down activity, strategy should be. Meaning , the bounds for decisions and the rules of play must be centrally determined, but not the experiments themselves.

I don't completely follow the last bit of your comment. It sounds like you agree that a centralized planner doesn't have enough context to make system wide decisions. Am I right?

	▲	Eddy_Viscosity2 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It sounds like you agree that a centralized planner doesn't have enough context to make system wide decisions. I don't think that's what that comment meant. Powerful central planners can plow over the concerns of smaller groups regardless of context. In the best case, they have and use the context and make good decisions that can be easily executed (net positive). The bad case is they think they have context but don't and make a bad decision (net negative). Worst case is they have bad faith actors gain control of central planning and abuse this power to benefit themselves (net negative: we find ourselves here more often than not).

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panick21_ 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Many things don't really need 'experiments'. You can just do them. Like run good buses.

The US already does run experiments thanks to the states, and we run many simply by having many countries.

The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions.

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red-iron-pine 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Like run good buses.

you act like people are born with an idea of what "run good busses" means.

how many busses? what models? what schedule? what routes to where? how do you staff them? how do you handle disruptions, strikes, bad weather, fist fights, budget cuts, etc?

there may be some known good solutions there, but how do you know they apply here? Australian public transit approaches aren't necessarily gonna work in frozen Canada, and great solutions for dense cities won't translate to rural.

at some point you're gonna have to figure out what works for your locality, and that may involve trying new things

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nilirl 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, but they're not safe experiments. And they're not experiments in the sense that we don't focus on shaping the reusable knowledge they produce.

It's not enough to try things, we also need a social system in place to allow trying to be safe and useful, even on failure.

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swiftcoder 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions.

Indeed. We have extensive and widely repeated evidence that walkable streets, cheap mass transit, free healthcare, decriminalisation of drugs, and a 4-day workweek are all strict improvements over our current societies.

And yet somehow all of those are viewed as radical reforms.

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mlsu 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Man you guys are so close.

"Somehow." Indeed, it is a mystery. 0.01% of the population has direct control over something like 50% of society's resources. Society moves to enrich them, at everyone else’s expense. Curious that.

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kjshsh123 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Most countries don't allow billionaires to influence elections like the USA. Maybe they still do in other ways.

Anyway, I think blaming the 0.01% for how 50%+1 vote is too easy.

Take electoral reform. Is that the 0.01%, or is the case that it's just the only one that could improve elections with electoral reform never has any incentive? Still, if voters really made it their priority and punished parties that run on it and ignore it once they win, it would be more likely to happen.

No doubt there is problems of reproduction of class, and conservatism to preserve existing hierarchies as they are. But is it the 0.01%? Or is it actually a much larger fraction? Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny even if it's 51% lording it over the 49% instead of 0.01% lording it over the 99.99%.

History shows people have a desire for minority scapegoats. We should know that is wrong.

Take housing. Is unaffordability to blame on the 5% of the population that are landlords? The 1% involved in housing development? Or is it maybe the 60%+ households that live in detached homes being insulated from the problem and being NIMBYs in local elections?

	▲	red-iron-pine a minute ago \| parent [-]
		that's cuz the billionaires already own the system and don't need to influence the elections. Putin waves his hand and it is so -- no election needed.

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lukan 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I like all of that, but is there really a scientific consensus about those things? I don't think so. Most seems to be disputed.

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kuerbel 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hmm what do you mean by disputed?

There is mixed but often promising evidence depending on context. For example there is quite a bit of urban planning evidence that shows that walkable environments improve physical activity and health outcomes and other outcomes. And so on for the other topics.

It’s also worth noting that current systems are not the result of a unified scientific optimization process. So even incremental changes that are supported by good evidence seem worth seriously exploring.

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lukan 6 hours ago | parent [-]

With disputed I mean mainly that whenever there is a study linked here for example (drug decriminalisation shows benefits) - there is a heated debate about it. And also links shown to other studies. I know that elements of the established medicine in germany for example are highly critical of decriminalisation. So - if something is disputed (rightfully or not) it is not hard to see why it is not allways implemented.

	▲	swiftcoder 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> whenever there is a study linked here... there is a heated debate about it There are tons of people in this world who don't believe in evolution, but there aren't a whole lot of scientists who doubt its validity - laypeople debating science is worth about what you pay for it. The only interesting question here is whether there is debate in the scientific community about these topics.

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JuniperMesos 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also, do you trust the scientists? Or the scientific establishment that decides what practitioners rise to the level of being trustworthy?

	▲	_DeadFred_ 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. I've found most of the people who don't trust don't want to trust, not they actually don't trust, because they know nothing about the bodies that establish this, the standards they hold, specific issues that cause their loss of trust. Zero real background. What actual bodies that establish credibility/verification do you currently not trust? What examples of their failures prompted you to stop trusting them or even be interested in the topic of if they were trustworthy gatekeeps? Most of the time that answer ends up having personal politics as the root, not actual trust issues that actually occurred and got the doubters attention. Normally if they have any examples they are politically sourced/politically generated laundry lists, not authentically generated concern or personal knowledge/care of the topic past wielding as a political weapon.