18 Comments
Nov 7, 2021Liked by Rohit Krishnan

> they effectively trade in sensationalism over any kind of journalistic integrity to the "truth".

I'd disagree, my main reason for not reading the news is that it provides information that is irrelevant. Even if journalism was a source of divine truth it would still be irrelevant, since it's divine truth known by everyone, and thus useless, I'll hear about it anyway, it will provide no benefit in a competitive scenario, it will allow me to do nothing in an altruistic one.

E.g. this article is political, and I dare say potentially polarizing, but I read it because I find your opinions to be left-field enough that they may give me a unique perspective. The same applies to ADS, Scott, Hanson, etc.

Maybe this is a personal nitpick, maybe most mildly successful people stumbled upon this strategy by mistake and are unaware that's the strategy they follow, and success in anythings (ideally many things) bring happiness almost by definition. Or to put it in your own words:

> We're all day traders in information these days. We probably should acknowledge it and be wary of it.

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> Whatever gets public attention gets pilloried. Whatever issue gets the limelight put on it becomes the next nexus.

I think this risks getting causality backwards. The opposite: public attention lingers on something for a few minutes/hours. If people find it polarizing, they get polarized and outrage happens and you hear about it more. I'm don't know if this is the case.

> If we want competent bureaucrats or technocrats or businessmen or economists or laypeople to actually solve any of our problems, it would truly be helpful for them to be given the space to try rather than be consistently be heckled from the cheap seats.

I am unaware why you are lumping businessmen with technocrats. At least based on a "libertarian" POV you could argue the system is working as intended.

Technocrats and bureaucrats *not* being able to do anything is the point, it is the only way to get governments to downscale peacefully, they end up having to downscale to critical tasks and live the rest to private industry.

Same with private industry even, it's a method of killing big corporations (or rather, letting them focus on the few things they do well and arguably need to do for society to function) and letting startups prosper.

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Nov 18, 2021Liked by Rohit Krishnan

You might find the work of James G. D’Angelo ( https://congressionalresearch.org/JamesDangelo.html ) on what he believes to be the benefits of legislative secrecy and the detriments of the “sunshine laws” (e.g. the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970) interesting. An article that summarizes his thesis: https://thefulcrum.us/congress/transparency-secrecy-congress.

That same line of thought can be seen in, say, Atlantic articles like https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/ and https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/lights-camera-congress/606199/

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Nov 10, 2021Liked by Rohit Krishnan

I recently wrote a post on my own blog about legibility as a framework. One of the things about politics that I find interesting is that most of the policies are actually very *illegible*, so the additional transparency we have is not actually making the process more *legible*, but allowing people to see which parties are pursuing what. When the object level discussion is illegible, people use proxies (Republican politician, Democrat politician) to evaluate the policies, instead of learning enough to make the object level legible to themselves. This, in turn, leads to a more polarized discussion, because everything becomes about proxies and loses track of what is actually happening.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting thought to add to the conversation.

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The problem is that new things in politics (new laws, regulations etc) can do more harm than good. Politics is different from tech because tech can *try* things and then delete it if it doesn’t work. Doesn’t work that way with laws generally. Of course, we can solve the problem (as you’ve previously discussed) by automatically including a 2 year sunset provision into every law and regulation unless specific outcomes or metrics are met. But until then, there is no “trying” things without implementing the for the long run.

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A new perspective to explain why should we discard micromanaging to each event and why should we discard some actions led us no where. But I found it is not focused on the algorithm..

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i mean, yes. but i think part of being an effective quarterback is ignoring the noise.

also, huge difference between business experimenting with a free hand and letting governments do it imo. there's at least a valid case to be made for "but that's public spending" vs. letting individuals experiment.

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When the "spotlight" is on local government it is sometimes called "The Eye of Soros".

https://www.unz.com/?s=%22eye+of+Soros%22&Action=Search&authors=steve-sailer&ptype=isteve

And Roland Fryer's paper on whether police reforms follow a "viral" incident or not shows how that spike in attention can have a negative affect on those local governments.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/policing-the-police.html

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