# Why Every Politician Thinks They’re So Right (and Why That’s a Disaster)

Since childhood, I have been troubled by the following paradox:

Suppose that in some country there are several parties. Each of them has its own vision of how to achieve economic and all other kinds of prosperity. Let’s assume they are all driven purely by the desire to help the country[^mqpos70ml1d].

Suppose these parties do certain things that are destructive to the country but effective for gaining power — for example, things that are obviously bad if you thought about them for 10 minutes, but most people didn’t spend those 10 minutes (e.g., direct governmental control of some companies).

The paradox is this: from the outside it seems that if all the parties simply stopped engaging in populism together, the country would be better off, because if everyone stopped doing populism at the same time, the same party would end up in power, but it would no longer be forced to fulfill silly pre-election promises.

However, if you are one of the party leaders, it seems to you that if you use populism to come to power, you will be able to apply your truest vision of the economy, not only to repair the damage from populism, but ultimately to come out ahead. It is very strange that from the outside, for the good of the people, you should not use populism, but from the inside—you should.

What would a politician of this country say if I explained this to him? I think something like: “Well, other parties are just wrong, and we are not; if they use populism, that's bad because they do it to obtain power to implement their bad policies, and our policies are good."

Here there is a counter-argument understandable to anyone: “Almost all people (at least all your political opponents) make mistakes; that is, people do not know how to seek truth, and often are extremely certain of something and then turn out to be wrong. And now, the climax: you are a human!”

\[Read the last three lines two more times\]

“But I am smarter than average!”

“Some of your political opponents are also smarter than average.”

Do you doubt that people are mistaken so often? Look at those who disagree with you on any political question, or on the question of religion, and at how confident they are. I witnessed how my mother’s acquaintance was puzzled about how her acquaintance could fail to understand the obvious thing that Ukrainian Orthodoxy is better than Russian. Another acquaintance of my mother added that since her friend could not understand such obvious arguments in favor of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, she must be crazy. To you this may seem funny, because you are a Protestant or Catholic. To me it is even funnier, because I am an atheist.

Even if you already understand that one should not use dirty tricks to obtain power, I would like to resolve the paradox from another side.

Let us imagine such a situation: half the inhabitants of the world believe in political theory A, and the other half—in political theory B. Expert opinions are also split in half. The experts believing in theory A appear just as educated in politics and just as intelligent as the experts believing in B.

What is the probability that A is right? 50%, if we do not take into account the possibility that both are wrong.

Now, replace A with a position on a controversial political question, where opinions are evenly divided, and B with the opposite position. Now, of course it seems to you that position A is correct with ≈100%.

But why does it seem so to you? Are you a super-genius, and the reasoning of others compared to yours is simply useless? When you took an IQ test, did you solve every single task perfectly, so that no one can even understand just how smart you are? Or have you studied collective disagreements for 30 years, and now you are so good at it that you can describe in detail every reasoning error of your political opponents, and if you explain it to them, they will immediately change their opinion? No? Well then, your conclusion is no better than that of any random person.

(In fact, I consider the guideline “until you convince 7 out of 10 of your political opponents of your ideology, do not do anything too large-scale” very useful. If the truth is on your side, you will be able to convince others without using dirty tricks if you have enough time, won’t you? And if you cannot, then either you are wrong, or people do not know how to argue effectively, and in that case, how can you be sure that you are not believing complete nonsense on all issues, but no one can convince you otherwise because you, as a human, do not know how to argue?)

I hope you were frightened by the problem I pointed out, by this wound of the world destroying the destinies of whole countries, but which people do not notice. So how do we fight it?

First of all, you can use heuristics. For example, if there are positions C and D, and the population is equally divided between them, but almost all experts are confident in C, and the remaining ones seem to be connected to companies that benefit from people believing in D, then one should believe in C.

But how to decide what to believe if you are going to become an expert? If you just repeat after other experts, you will add nothing to the discussion (by the way, if you do this, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you forget to mention that you believe in a certain position only because other experts believe in it. This will save us from many collective traps, like the one where all “experts” believe in C only because other “experts” say they believe in C).

To form your own opinion, you need to debate. Debate a lot.

Professional politicians spend thousands of hours of their lives on political struggle. It seems reasonable to spend at least 100 hours in debates, so as not to fight on the side of evil all your life without knowing it.

“But I have probably spent 100 hours watching videos of the opposite side and coming up with replies!”

The other side also watches your videos and also comes up with convincing rebuttals of what was said, so this is clearly not the path that can lead you to the truth.

Watching videos of your political opponents and inventing elegant refutations of their silly arguments is an order of magnitude less effective than debate. I have seen many debates, and most of the content is devoted to discussing things that are not particularly relevant.

If you ask any non-communist why he is not a communist, he will answer that if you abolish rewards for labor, people will not work. In fact, communists believe that abolishing rewards for labor will make people more altruistic, and they will work for free. This is the real root of disagreement, and this is what all debates about communism should be about, but in reality online debates about it usually drift into something completely unrelated to this stumbling stone, because debaters think that their silly viewers can only understand crooked analogies and historical examples. If you want to make sure that communism does not work, find a real communist and try to persuade him—then, if you misunderstand the essence of their arguments, he will point it out to you. Even if in the end he changes his opinion, you will realize that debating with a living person feels different from thinking over a video. A living person will use arguments you would never have thought of, which, even if wrong, require significant effort to refute (otherwise he would have refuted them himself already).

Here are some tips on how to conduct debates:

1.  Respect your interlocutor, never use insults.
2.  Say only those arguments that, if you found out they were false, would weaken your confidence in the position you defend (if an argument does not meet this criterion, then it simply has nothing to do with the conclusion, and any result of its discussion will not change your opponent’s opinion either).
3.  Use the technique from [this article](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/exa5kmvopeRyfJgCy/double-crux-a-strategy-for-mutual-understanding):
4.  Repeat the previous tips to your interlocutor if he does not follow them.

(Why did I even write about this political overconfidence, if Eliezer mentioned some kind of similar logic in the Sequences? Because we cannot make it so that everyone reads the Sequences, but we can make it so that a significant part of the population reads this article. The world still suffers from the opinion that those who disagree with you are simply crazy or evil, and therefore politicians are overconfident in their views, and instead of spending energy on double-checking whether they are right, or on good debate with opponents, they spend all their energy inventing better ways to throw sand in the voters’ eyes so that they, even for stupid reasons, believe in their ideology. Therefore, I would like you to share this article with your acquaintances who are not rationalists.)

Another thing we can use instead of debates is experiments. Just imagine: instead of arguing for decades about whether higher minimum wages cause unemployment or not, and changing policy every 4 years so that under half of U.S. presidents ineffective economic policy is carried out, we simply take two towns of 10,000 people, almost identical in all respects, and in one we set a high minimum wage, in the other a low one, and look at the results. Yes, one of these towns will suffer, but when the experiment is over, a 340-million country will not suffer under half its presidents.

In fact, such experiments should be conducted on most political questions.

Deng Xiaoping, before introducing many capitalist reforms, implemented them in one province and looked at the results. China is out of poverty now.

Some political ideas will almost certainly not work—that is, with a probability of 1% they will greatly benefit society, but with a probability of 99% they will destroy it. It is reasonable to test such an idea in a small town of 10,000 inhabitants from the point of view of the country’s good, but from the point of view of the town’s inhabitants, this will almost certainly destroy it. Therefore, it would be fair if the federal government, after the destruction of the town, allocated a lot of money for its restoration, to fully compensate for the cost of the experiment. Such experiments will never be conducted under the current system, because no mayor could sell to the voters the near-certain destruction of their town.

Conducting those experiments is clearly a reasonable solution, so why is it not used constantly? There are two reasons. The first and most important—it is too complicated: legislators’ time is limited, and they simply cannot constantly launch experiments simultaneously with their main work. This problem is not difficult to solve: it is enough just to create a “Ministry of Experiments,” which would not need to have every experiment approved by parliament, but whose members could be fired for bad work, like judges.

The second reason—if a leader is so sure that communism (or something else) works, then why bother with experiments at all? Just introduce communism throughout the country at once, despite the fact that it has never been implemented anywhere before, and send all dissenters to the gulag. What may go wrong???

Conclusion: if you have not found obvious mistakes in this text, which the author does not notice out of his human stupidity, then it would be very useful for society if you shared this article with your acquaintances. Otherwise, I would be glad to hear your criticism in the comments.

*(maybe) To be continued: How to get rid of populism?*

[^mqpos70ml1d]: I’m talking about the majority of the population or party members, not about political leaders. But imagine that political leaders are altruistic too—just for a thought experiment.