The underlying issue, and one that bugs the hell out of me, is Policy vs Truth.
You can say true things all day, and convince nobody. You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science), and completely fail. People don't care about Truth, they care about what changes they need to make, and who is asking them to make them.
Good policy is only partially based on truth, it's more based on easy implementation and high acceptability. In the article, you don't talk about the real reasons (truth), you do what you need to do to steer the ship. That probably includes bullshitting, compromise, apparent-hypocrisy, etc.
I'm afraid we've completely forgotten to separate the means from the end goal.
I've tried to explain this to people, and I've been met with blank stares from even the most intelligent folks.
As suggested though, it works wonders if you're at least a little good at magical thinking or self deception. (If I run these 3 miles, I'm much more likely to get that raise)
While practical and maybe inevitable, this approach will alienate exactly the kind of people you want on your side if you want to _actually_ reach your goal and course correct when needed.
Instead you will attract people who will happily pretend to be on the right path and will keep performing rain dances on titanic.
What you propose can work if it is a technocratic conspiracy where people who know what's going on maintain power and can update direction relatively easily (we were always at war with Eurasia). Then again, there is always a risk of losing real power to one of the mid-rank rain-dancing activists and screw up the whole project, maybe for good.
Technocratic conspiracies always fall very quickly to the mid-rank rain-dancing people unless the rain dancing is really complex and has really visible effects.
It's not even something to see as a risk, it's certainty.
It's not all or nothing. Good policy accomplishes the goal and attracts masses.
For whatever quality metric you assign to a voter, you can't get the majority without including some of those below the median.
In large populations, for example, 'knowledgeable' implies you need to convince people who know less than average as well as the most knowledgeable. And the average is real, real low on specific knowledge about complicated issues.
This is related to an issue I've studied a lot and recently written about. In "Don't make a fetish of having a flat organization" I try to address this in the context of business, making clear that a well-designed bureaucracy can empower an organization to be more flexible at scale, but for various reasons we don't often think of it this way:
But perhaps more relevant, in the context of government and policy, I've tried to make the point that we should think of government and bureaucracy as machines that produce policy. Every machine is optimized to produce certain kinds of policies. If you advocate for a great policy, and you've the facts on your side, and yet no one will listen to you, then you need to think about the structure of that machine, because it will take a change in the machine to get that machine to start producing the kinds of policy that you want:
There are two ways to improve situation, both are for the very far future (assuming humanity will survive long enough). Either change the human brain itself artificially, to remove hacks and shortcuts made by the mother nature, and make people really rational (I am not speaking about removing emotions, just removing their ability to cloud the judgement) and with minimum of cognitive biases and fallacies, or to make an AGI to rule the humanity (probably a worse solution since it will be uneven relationship).
Humanity already corrects itself in terms of better adaptation for denser and wider social life. Modern urban society requires less emotional response than people were able to give centuries ago. You have to accommodate wider circle of people that you interact with, including the incredible amount of strangers that you meet through whole life. With population growth and more urbanization this process will only continue.
I tend to think about it as: The ends never justify the means, but sometimes the ends are important enough that you do it anyway.
As a limiting example, I don't consider violence to ever be a good thing per se, but I still accept its use in self defence. I don't like using the word 'justified' to describe that acceptance, though that may say more about how I see 'justified' as a concept than it does about anything concrete.
The power and foolishness of democracy lies therein. A good story is more motivating that the complicated truths of life. It is probably better for all of us to link every tornado and hurricane to climate change in a neat little story than refrain from doing so because we cannot link the particular storm on man-made climate change. The story has power to effect positive change.
You don’t think people commonly notice the manner in which they cover this and other stories, and conclude that Teh Liberal Media (tm) is a bunch of liars who have taken them for rubes?
You're stating the overall position of most western public health policy, and the outcome of that thinking hasn't been good.
Manipulating stated goals from real goals and influencing behavior via nudges rather than argument can be effective for small outcomes, but as a whole the practice is antidemocratic. More practically, if the approach is repeated, you begin to poison the well - people learn to work the system they're in, and any kind of split between stated goal and actual goal gives wiggle room to work an angle.
Consider the failures of mask mandates after initial anti mask messaging from the CDC. The CDC's initial goal was to tactically protect the n95 supply for maybe two months.
Yes lot of good laws can't be implemented because it'd do more harm to actually implement them in earnest. Ie Indian govt decided to reward people for catching snakes, but people started to raise snakes and when program ended they released all leftovers to wild, worsening the situation.
The comparison of different voting systems is what clued me in to this. A number of "generally" more optimal voting systems have degenerate outcomes in certain edge cases which would lead to poor acceptability. It's not enough to have an optimal voting system- people also need to find the outcome somewhat acceptable to consent to the result.
The current two-party-first-past-the-post system in the US is an example that is not especially optimal, but does pretty well on acceptability of outcome. People get mad their candidate lost, argue about voter fraud, argue about the electoral college... But the system never produces a selection people see as flat-out broken & invalid, unlike some more optimal systems. That is a pretty important feature.
> But the system never produces a selection people see as flat-out broken & invalid
No, it absolutely does. Imagine a campaign issue where 60% of the electorate wants to plant more trees, and 40% wants to pave all the forests over with parking lots. Candidate A proposes planting oak trees, Candidate B proposes planting maple trees, and Candidate C loves him some asphalt. The final results: 30% for A, 30% for B, 40% for C. Vote-splitting like this is an unacceptable outcome of FPTP; it may not show up when we arbitrarily limit the system to two parties, but it's preposterous that we need to limit the vote to two candidates in order to avoid this outcome, and the two-party system produces all sorts of other problems on its own. This isn't to say that other voting systems are perfect, but they're all better than FPTP, which has no virtue other than being the simplest thing that can be called democracy at all (which mattered a lot in a world of illiterate people who had little familiarity with self-governance, but not so much these days).
>I've tried to explain this to people, and I've been met with blank stares from even the most intelligent folks.
That's definitely an experience I've had with similar topics. I particularly remember talking to a friend who I generally respect and admire about something that isn't socially acceptable for no obvious reason, and upon explaining my thoughts and asking what the deal was with it, they completely shut down and acted like I was totally insane.
It's just particularly annoying that so many people claim to be for truth or actions based on some ultimate moral value, but then act totally differently because all they were ever really for was tradition which includes hypocrisy about what it's for.
They're really weird and lots of them are gay so the social mechanisms that stop us giving groups a lot of shit for no good reason are weaker for them.
This is not a particularly comforting explanation, but I'm unaware of a better one (and I've discussed this with a bunch of smart furry friends over the years).
There's a term for this and it's called 'Public Communications' sometimes into the domain of propaganda.
This is not a 'new' concept it's as old as time and 100% of people with real power have an awareness of this, it's almost a defining feature of an elite class.
Policy should obviously be guided by 'Truth' and we need transparency, at the same time, irrespective of how smart individuals are, as crowds, we act with a lowest-common-demoninator IQ and things need to be communicated effectively.
A great example of 'Truths We Cant't Handle' are vaccination-caused deaths.
All the vaccines cause death, and AZ is particularly tricky. But it's really hard to find exact data on that because it's very well suppressed. I suggest it's probably available with some digging but if you imagine a 'chain of communications' from the doctors, to health officials, to politicians to media, all of whom are ostensibly trying to act in the interest of the 'Public Good' - it's not going to come out.
Bonnie Henry in BC is a great Public Health official, I listen to her communications almost weekly, very smart, generally open, data-driven, smart journalists asking good questions - but they have never broached the subject of 'How many have died form vaccines'. The information is just too explosive. So they don't talk about it. We're learn more about it after the pandemic.
That's ridiculous. Not only are any such deaths carefully tracked, they are massively publicized in mainstream media. The first reported AZ deaths were on the front pages of every newspaper. Might as well have been a presidential election.
Of course vaccine deaths are tracked, I didn't deny that (FYI it's a very difficult thing to make perfect correlation between a vaccine and death, esp. with so many overlapping conditions).
The media has hugely downplayed the issue. Of course they have to do perfunctory reports on public information if it does happen, but it's not something they talk about otherwise.
Dr. Fauci doesn't come on TV and talk about the materiality of vaccine related death.
CNN is not doing their emotive vignettes on the 'Family destroyed by death due to vaccine' and interviews with sobbing family members.
There's obviously no narrative around that, in fact, the narrative is in the opposite direction, i.e. 'Blood Clots Can Happen but the Vaccine Is Still Safe'.
While there is some information about the AZ vaccine, there's scant info about the others, after doing a perfunctory search all I could find were 'The study showed a total of possible 3 deaths from the vaccine during such and such period' without any qualifying data.
The data is obviously being collected but it's not being fully shared and definitely not being communicated other than in a perfunctory way.
I'm guessing that's because both the actual number is very low relative to the number of doses given out and that fewer people have died from the vaccine than would die as a consequence of fearmongering by a particular political party here were there open discussion of that. There are a handful of topics like this where there seems to be near-universal agreement that the best thing for society is to just not poke the bear.
You can say true things all day, and convince nobody. You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science), and completely fail. People don't care about Truth, they care about what changes they need to make, and who is asking them to make them.
Good policy is only partially based on truth, it's more based on easy implementation and high acceptability. In the article, you don't talk about the real reasons (truth), you do what you need to do to steer the ship. That probably includes bullshitting, compromise, apparent-hypocrisy, etc.
I'm afraid we've completely forgotten to separate the means from the end goal.
I've tried to explain this to people, and I've been met with blank stares from even the most intelligent folks.
As suggested though, it works wonders if you're at least a little good at magical thinking or self deception. (If I run these 3 miles, I'm much more likely to get that raise)