This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
Previous: A Sketch of Belocracy, Evaluation as Feedback Cycle, Idea Generation and Sifting, The Belocrat. Next: Executive Belocracy
So far in our implementation of belocracy we have described how we evaluate policies that have been passed, and how we collect ideas from the citizenry at large. The data system encourages citizens to suggest problems, policy options and relevant evidence, and then through moderation and reputation and a hidden prediction market, sifts the best ideas to the top. The next step is turning those ideas into viable, worked-out proposals that respect the realities of current law, governmental practice, and societal constraints. In belocracy, this is the job of policy designers and researchers. The researchers collect evidence: published studies; written essays; stories directly from people affected. If needed, they conduct original research. Meanwhile, policy designers work with the collected body of evidence and the proposed ideas to design their best idea for a policy that will improve society around these problems.
Some of this work has been done by citizens contributing to the belocratic data system already. Citizens can post evidence they’ve found and ideas they want to see pursued. Policy researchers and designers take it to the next level of professionalism, whether that’s because they’re paid professionals who work for belocracy or because they’re the kind of amateurs who would like to be. A Belocrat prioritizing a set of problems is a signal for policy researchers and designers to focus on them.
Just as editors sometimes have to prod their authors to complete their work, Belocrats shepherd proposals: all the policy designs need to arrive at the gates of the policy jury at the same time. Belocrats have latitude in scheduling those juries — a researcher with a compelling study to run may convince a Belocrat to push the date off, or policy designers working quickly may persuade them to move it earlier.
To take a simple example, consider the places where marijuana has been legalized. The idea of legalization is straightforward: remove the laws that make it a crime. Most places have put in place considerably more complex regimes in an attempt to tax and regulate marijuana and keep its legalization from becoming a new problem. Many citizens prefer that change happen in an orderly and thoughtful manner, so regulation has included everything from safe storage conditions, methods of extraction, amounts permissible to put in food and labeling laws to keep people from getting sick or surprised to how many plants would constitute a commercial operation so that home growers wouldn’t be subject to taxes. Many places have included purchase limits to reduce abuse: this has come with the need to track purchases across stores so that people couldn’t easily avoid the limits. With our current set of expectations as a consumer — being able to walk into stores having done no research and buy things and expect that we’ll survive the experience with few unpleasant effects, for example — many industries require a fair bit of rule-setting and enforcement. States that have legalized marijuana have needed to build and staff offices to support this regulation far beyond what’s obvious from the simple title of 'legalizing marijuana.’
I encourage you and everyone else to argue which exact regulations are necessary and which ones are overreach by the state; getting it right isn’t straightforward. Putting in enough thought that the proposals we put forward have considered a good number of the potential problems and have worked out an initial idea of what to do about them is why belocracy relies on individual policy designers to put forward worked-out proposals. Being well-thought-out is one aspect of being effective, and the belocratic data system is too free-for-all and amateur to be regularly successful at this kind of deeply thoughtful creativity.
For policy juries to consider proposals and for evaluation panels to review results, we have to have criteria that we’ll consider to determine how well the policy succeeded. We want to minimize moving the goalposts. The TSA was proposed not to prevent people forgetfully bringing knives on board airplanes nor to protect us from the danger of toothpaste or water bottles, but to prevent terrorist attacks. Every time they get to claim a victory because they caught a weapon that was never going to be used is a travesty, given the enormous financial and privacy cost that they impose. But trusting proposal authors to define criteria is foolish. They might well ignore the costs of policies they like.
Perhaps instead of describing how the proposal should be judged, they should just write a description of the problem to be solved? After all, if they solve the problem, then the policy is working, right? Except this misses any consideration about cost. If the problem is 9/11 style terrorism and we put forth two proposals — one to build out the TSA to stop weapons getting on to planes, and the other to just massively increase the FBI and surveillance state to catch plots before they hatch — we can imagine looking back 25 years later and saying “yep, we haven’t had any further airplanes crash into buildings.” But these two proposals are massively different, and a fair evaluation of them would consider the costs that they’ve imposed, as well as taking into account the fact that we also strengthened cockpit doors and changed our culture to not give in to plane hijackers.
So Belocrats run a three-stage process for evaluation criteria. Policy designers write the first pass of the criteria on their proposal. Their competitors, the authors of competing policies, write the second pass. Finally, the Belocrats decide which of the criteria proposed will be with the final proposal, potentially adding their own ideas if needed. The criteria to evaluate a policy will be separately reviewed by the evaluation panel at evaluation time for policies that are rolled out. If the valors find the proposals wanting they can always send them to other designers for further additions or improvements.
Though some people can do both well, recognizing that design and research are different skills is a key step to creating better policies. Brilliant design is always informed by a deep understanding of the context and lives of those who will use it. Often the best design is done by someone who is both experienced in design and plans to use the result themselves. Policies need to be designed, too. When researchers try to do design, they often give us articles that go over an interesting slice of the history of the problem but then peter out the moment it comes time to propose a solution. When policy designers haven’t done enough research, they give us proposals that are based on what they’re familiar with, which often backfires in the much more complex world we all live in.
Ethan Zuckerman once picked out for criticism an article proposing to physically isolate prisoners and give them VR headsets to keep them from being bored. For Zuckerman, this was largely an opportunity to rant about the insufferability of tech bros trying their hand at social policy. More than anything what I see in the original article’s author is someone trying to do design — he cares about the problems of prisoners fighting and hurting each other and of them teaching each other criminality — without having understood people who are not like himself. Zuckerman’s response is in the researcher’s mode — his stories of the history of prison reform are interesting, but he punts on proposals other than to say that whoever does come up with proposals should do so in collaboration with prisoners.
Academics often prioritize the research side. Technologists often focus on designing solutions based on what they know or imagine today. Without marrying the two disciplines, we get the worst of both worlds, like articles describing some of the details (but not enough of them to support good design) and design proposals that are wildly dysfunctional to reality.
The best proposals are built by a designer who has full access to a wealth of research-based knowledge and understanding of the problems and constraints. From that knowledge, they have to exert enormous care, cleverness and thoughtfulness to find a novel idea that is also good. Creating formal positions for the two roles is one way to help them view their strengths as complementary rather than competing.
Amateurs can be great. But they can also be terrible. Consistency is one of the marks of professionalism. These are the most important problems of society we're talking about: if we want consistently professional quality, we need to pay professionals to be able to provide it. "If you think it's expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur!" is the right saying to keep in mind. So we pay professionals.
To ensure an adequate supply of professionals, Belocrats regularly run SIEVEs with candidate pools from those who have built up a solid reputation and invite the winners to take up a paid role.
Amateurs are still welcome. They can collect research as researchers and put together proposals as designers (and nothing prevents them from taking both roles). The main difference is how much citizen support in the belocratic data system is needed for someone’s proposal to be sent to the policy jury. Professionals have earned that courtesy by having been invited to the role. Amateurs need their proposals to get some degree of attention and support within the belocratic data system before their proposal will be included.
Of course lobbyists will propose policies! They do it in our current system, though they work to keep it a secret when they can. Belocracy welcomes their proposals. Lobbyists often have access to deeply relevant industry expertise, though they also have self-serving motives. We want that expertise to inform policies, so we should welcome them proposing ideas. Belocracy allows citizens and policy designers to incorporate those ideas when they’re good for society, and point out when they’re hypocritical and self-serving. Watchdog individuals and organizations will have an easier time watching and responding when the ideas are visible. And since proposals will be reviewed for success, policies that only benefit the corporation that wrote them will have a harder time staying implemented even if they do manage to make it through the process. Meanwhile, people who consistently serve as shills for industry without considering what’s best for society will lose reputation rapidly.
Lobbyists are smart creatures, so they’ll likely become sneakier in a more transparent system. But many of them work for companies that see their job not as breaking the system but as playing by the rules that are set out. If we set out rules that let them get things that genuinely help their clients as long as they take into account the rest of society, perhaps some of them will contribute usefully. Or perhaps they won’t, in which case the valors will catch them or the petition system (a later chapter) will.
Our current process is optimized to make sure that a single group can’t dominate: though regular citizens often have very little influence, at least there are a variety of powerful interest groups that compete with each other and keep it from being just one of them that wins all the time. This is how we end up with foolish but politically useful compromises like NASA manufacturing its rockets using parts from factories in 27 states. Policies have to gain enough adherents to pass, not just have a few, and while this gives political operators lots of opportunity for wheeling and dealing, it also ensures that we don’t get as many policies designed to only benefit the one person on top.
Juries will likely still be influenced by newspapers and op-ed writers and celebrities, so political considerations will come into play. But since designers won’t know who will be on their policy jury, they’ll have a harder time targeting specific political considerations. Policy juries will also stand to personally benefit from policies succeeding, so this is mostly a benefit to all of us, as instead of offering pork to favored constituents, designers and juries have to try to win at evaluation time.
Some areas are going to be hotly contested. Many people will put forth proposals because they’re interested, because there’s lots of money and reputation to earn, or because there are lots of ideas floating around. When we have more than a few proposals, the Belocrat responsible for the problem can rank the proposals via a one-off prediction market on which proposals are most likely to succeed. They can also fill a separate policy jury just to whittle down the number of proposals to a manageable number - generally 3-5 - with a focus on ensuring that the most unique of the top dozen or so proposals survive the whittling.