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I think the root of many political disagreements between rationalists and other groups, is that other groups look at parts of the world and see a villain-shaped hole. Eg: There's a lot of people homeless and unable to pay rent, rent is nominally controlled by landlords, the problem must be that the landlords are behaving badly. Or: the racial demographics in some job/field/school underrepresent black and hispanic people, therefore there must be racist people creating the imbalance, therefore covert (but severe) racism is prevalent.
Having read Meditations on Moloch, and Inadequate Equilibria, though, you come to realize that what look like villain-shaped holes frequently aren't. The people operating under a fight-the-villains model are often making things worse rather than better.
I think the key to persuading people may be to understand and empathize with the lens in which systems thinking, equilibria, and game theory are illegible, and it's hard to tell whether an explanation coming from one of these frames is real or fake. If you think problems are driven by villainy, then it would make a lot of sense for illegible alternative explanations to be misdirection.
I think I basically disagree with this, or think that it insufficiently steelmans the other groups.
For example, the homeless vs. the landlords; when I put on my systems thinking hat, it sure looks to me like there's a cartel, wherein a group that produces a scarce commodity is colluding to keep that commodity scarce to keep the price high. The facts on the ground are more complicated--property owners are a different group from landlords, and homelessness is caused by more factors than just housing prices--but the basic analysis that there are different classes, those classes have different interests, and those classes are fighting over government regulation as a tool in their conflict seems basically right to me. Like, it's really not a secret that many voters are motivated by keeping property values high, politicians know this is a factor that they will be judged on.
Maybe you're trying to condemn a narrow mistake here, where someone being an 'enemy' implies that they are a 'villain', which I agree is a mistake. But it sounds like you're making a more generic point, which is that when people have political disagreements with the rationalists, it's normally because they're thinking in terms of enemy action instead of not thinking in systems. But a lot of what the thinking in systems reveals is the way in which enemies act using systemic forces!
3jimrandomh
I think this is correct as a final analysis, but ineffective as a cognitive procedure. People who start by trying to identify villains tend to land on landlords-in-general, with charging-high-rent as the significant act, rather than a small subset of mostly non-landlord homeowners, with protesting against construction as the significant act.
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.