I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
> then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
I think the problem that Waterluvian's is getting at is precisely that WYSIWYG politics is taken as the preferred choice without understanding the implications that make it not actually work. For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
> If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
If the quality of those two goes up, hopefully people start employing second-order thinking and beyond and realize that WYSIWYG politics may not be what it seems to be at the surface level.
> For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
Passing a censorship/surveillance bill using the pretext of protecting children is the opposite of WYSIWYG. The true motive is building an apparatus to use to enforce other authoritarian policies and protecting children is the Trojan horse.
If people were better informed about second order effects then that wouldn't work because they would see through the consequences when a pretext is being presented for a bad idea, and then the politicians who attempt it would be more often punished than rewarded. The tactic of lying to people would happen less often because it would be selected against when the number of people who see through you is enough to boot you out of office.
The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Absolutely. Bread and circuses isn't a new idea.
>The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Points for the doing good in the end. But it's a rule in hell/serve in heaven issue, if you first need to create hell with your quest for power you have failed the objective of doing good in the end.
Evil can act Good, but Good cannot act Evil. Evil has that advantage over Good that cannot be matched.
This continuously plays out in our political systems. Good actors cannot fight the deluge of evil of their opponents, who are free to lie cheat and steal.
Good binds its own hands. For good to win, it must act with even greater evil. At which point, it becomes the very thing that it tried to defeat.
The assumption here is that being Evil is advantageous. It's obviously advantageous to personal gain, but the relevant thing is whether it's advantageous to staying in power, and then the system you want to design is the one where it isn't.
Notice also that it isn't binary. You can make it harder to be Evil and then have less of it even if you never have none.
Rarely a great RPG forces my good party to make difficult decisions.
The most confident I ever was that I was "obviously correct" was when I was 20.
“Unions can be corrupt” or “You don’t need unions to get your voice heard” is the kind of rhetoric that leads to disinterest in unions over the years.
> The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy.
Empathy, yes. Simplicity doesn't normally lead to empathy; complexity does.
Also, it's not about not being able to see any bad, but some things that obviously seemed correct, stop seeming so obvious.
Reminds me of that clip where a man in some TV show gets slapped by the woman host and he slaps her back. Then a bunch of men from the audience come to beat him up. It's one thing to have the moral "never hit a woman" and "protect women", but if women abuse these views to mistreat and humiliate others without consequence, that doesn't seem right either.
It doesn't seem right for the men to have beat him up for defending himself. They thought they were being moral, but they weren't.
Sometimes moral views can require nuance.
Entropy. Things will dissolve enough that eventually someone will make changes. It takes a long time though, this is likely a feature.
Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)
Currwntly, politicians each have a series of meetings over time with different parties (constituents, lobbyists, domain experts, coalition members) and then at some point one of them drafts and tables a law (that's probably already been informally planned for ages among those in the know) and others vote for it (where many of those votes have probably also been informally pre-arranged for ages.)
To get WYSIWYG, every bit of all of those meetings would need to occur in the open. And likely the only way to practically accomplish that, in a “nothing up my sleeve” manner (i.e. to guarantee that there were no meetings outside of the official ones), would be to have all those meetings occur contiguously as part of one long recorded session in one place, with everyone who wants “a seat at the table” needing to operate on that session’s schedule; and where the politicians involved (i.e. those everyone else is there to influence) have a political career that starts and ends with that single session.
In other words, basically do the papal-election thing, or the sequestered-jury-trial thing: lock all the concerned parties (politicians + PAC leaders + lobbyists + etc) in a building together, and don’t let them out until they make a year’s worth of law. (But unlike either of those—record everything! Don’t allow any two people to be in the same room together without a camera.)
Another is that they would just agree on what to do before the official start of the process. Or learn to speak in code. Or pass notes to each other off camera etc.
The closest approximation that might actually do something would be to require the final version of any piece of legislation to be published a year before the final vote. Then the product of a backroom deal can't be enacted before anyone else has a chance to mount an opposition.
Another would be to make it easier to repeal things than to pass them. A lot of current corruption relies on the misfeature that we apply the same purposely-arduous process intended to inhibit bad things from passing as the requirement to un-pass existing bad things, so then if they can corrupt the entire process once they only have to maintain control of a single branch to prevent it from being rolled back.
Well, it wouldn't work for politicians that pick decisions based on what end benfit they get. Would work fine for people. Would need actually honest media tho
Which by definition contains some signalling that deviates from WYSIWYG.
Otherwise I can't really see your point.
I’m running on a campaign of “PUT IT THE %#^* BACK IN THE SAME PLACE EVERY TIME WHEN YOU’RE DONE WITH IT.”