Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Author:Eliezer Yudkowsky
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Machine Intelligence Research Institute
Published: 2017-11-13T22:53:19+00:00

ix. The Overton window

SIMPLICIO: I’m beginning to experience the same sort of confusion as the Visitor about your view of the world, Conventional Cynical Economist. If voters weren’t stupid, the world would look very different than it does.

If the ultimate source of stupidity were poorly designed governmental structures, then average voters would sound smarter than average politicians. I don’t think that’s actually true.

CECIE: There are deeper forms of psychological molasses that generalize beyond first-past-the-post political candidates. The still greater force locking bad political systems into place is an equilibrium of silence about policies that aren’t “serious.”

A journalist thinks that a candidate who talks about ending the War on Drugs isn’t a “serious candidate.” And the newspaper won’t cover that candidate because the newspaper itself wants to look serious… or they think voters won’t be interested because everyone knows that candidate can’t win, or something? Maybe in a US-style system, only contrarians and other people who lack the social skill of getting along with the System are voting for Carol, so Carol is uncool the same way Velcro is uncool and so are all her policies and ideas? I’m not sure exactly what the journalists are thinking subjectively, since I’m not a journalist. But if an existing politician talks about a policy outside of 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 believes it would be a blunder for a politician to talk about. The space of what it isn’t a “blunder” for a politician to talk about is conventionally termed the “Overton window.”

SIMPLICIO: It’s all well and good to talk about complicated clever things, Cynical Economist, but what explanatory power does all this added complexity have? Why postulate politicians who believe that journalists believe that voters won’t take something seriously? Why not just say that people are sheep?

CECIE: To name a recent example from the United States, it explains how, one year, gay marriage is this 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 modeled a gay marriage endorsement as a ‘gaffe’ or ‘unelectable’, something they’d write about in the sports-coverage overtone of a blunder by the other team—”

SIMPLICIO: Ah, so you say it was a conspiracy by evil journalists?

CECIE: No! Those journalists weren’t consciously deciding the equilibrium. The journalists were writing “serious” articles, i.

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