This proposal increases the influence of the states, in the sense of "how much does it matter that any given person bothered to vote?", but does it increase their preference satisfaction? If the 4 states each conceive of themselves as red or blue states, then each of them will be thinking "under the current system I estimate an X% chance that we'll elect my party's president while under the new system I estimate a Y% chance we'll elect my party's president". If both sides are perfect predictors then one will conclude that Y<X so they should not do the deal. If both sides are imperfect predictors such that they both think Y>X, then the outside view still tells them it's equally likely that they're the sucker here and shouldn't participate.

Smaller communities have a lot more control over their gatekeeping because, like, they control it themselves, whereas the larger field's gatekeeping is determined via openended incentives in the broader world that thousands (maybe millions?) of people have influence over.

Does the field of social psychology not control the gatekeeping of social psychology? I guess you could argue that it's controlled by whatever legislative body passes the funding bills, but most of the social psychology incentives seem to be set by social psychologists, so both small and large communities control their gatekeeping themselves and it's not obvious to me why smaller ones would do better.

At some level of smallness your gatekeeping can be literally one guy who decides whether an entrant is good enough to pass the gate, and I acknowledge that that seems like it could produce better than median selection pressure. But by the time you get big enough that you're talking about communities collectively controlling the gatekeeping... aren't we just describing the same system at a population of one thousand vs one hundred thousand?

I could imagine an argument that yes actually, differences of scale matter because larger communities have intrinsically worse dynamics for some reason, but if that's the angle I would expect to at least hear what the reason is rather than have it be left as self-evident.

A small research community of unusually smart/competent/well-informed people can relatively-easily outperform a whole field, by having better internal memetic selection pressures.

It's not obvious to me that this is true, except insofar as a small research community can be so unusually smart/competent/etc that their median researcher is better than a whole field's median researcher so they get better selection pressure "for free". But if an idea's popularity in a wide field is determined mainly by its appeal to the median researcher, I would naturally expect its popularity in a small community to be determined mainly by its appeal to the median community member.

This claim looks like it's implying that research communities can build better-than-median selection pressures but, can they? And if so why have we hypothesized that scientific fields don't?

I think Valentine gave a good description of psychopath as "people who are naturally unconstrained by social pressures and have no qualms breaking even profound taboos if they think it'll benefit them", where just eyeballing human nature, that seems to be a "real" category that would show up as a distinct blip in a graph of human behaviour and not just "how constrained by social pressures people are is a normally distributed property and people get called psychopaths in linear proportion to how far left they are on the bell curve".

Yep, your intended meaning about the distinctive mental architecture was pretty clear, just wanted to offer the factual correction.

They made it so the sociopath at the top of the pyramid was the kind that’s clever and myopic and numerate and invested in the status quo

The word "myopic" seems out of place in this list of positive descriptors, especially contrasted with crazed gloryhounds. Was this supposed to be "farsighted"?

By "psychopath" I mean someone with the cluster B personality disorder.

There isn't a cluster B personality disorder called psychopathy. Psychopathy has never been a formal disorder and the only time we've ever been close to it is way back in 1952 when the DSM-1 had a condition called "Sociopathic Personality Disturbance". The closest you'll get these days is Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is a garbage bin diagnosis that covers a fairly broad range of antisocial behaviours, including the thing most people have in mind when they say "psychopath", but also plenty of other personality archetypes that don't seem particularly psychopathic, like adrenaline junkies and people with impulse control issues.

I think you might be living in a highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech worker bubble.

Like, in a world where the median person is John Wentworth

"What if the entire world was highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech workers?" is the entire premise here.

OpenAI is known to have been sitting on a 99.9% effective (by their own measure) watermarking system for a year. They chose not to deploy it

Do you have a source for this?

Metz persistently fails to state why it was necessary to publish Scott Alexander's real name in order to critique his ideas.

It's not obvious that that should be the standard. I can imagine Metz asking "Why shouldn't I publish his name?", the implied "no one gets to know your real name if you don't want them to" norm is pretty novel.

One obvious answer to the above question is "Because Scott doesn't want you to, he thinks it'll mess with his psychiatry practice", to which I imagine Metz asking, bemused "Why should I care what Scott wants?" A journalist's job is to inform people, not be nice to them! Now Metz doesn't seem to be great at informing people anyway, but at least he's not sacrificing what little information value he has upon the altar of niceness.