Bringing rationality into politics (with Elizabeth Edwards-Appell)
Spencer Greenberg speaks with former state representative Elizabeth Edwards-Appel about her journey from activist to politician, her epistemic transformation through rationalism, and practical insights into running for office and navigating the complexities of political systems.
Deep Dive Analysis
9 Topic Outline
Elizabeth's Journey to Running for State Office
Campaigning Strategies and Voter Dynamics in New Hampshire
Epistemic Shift: From Ideology to Evidence-Based Thinking
Impact of LessWrong Sequences on Worldview and Social Life
Navigating Party Pressure and Political Capital in Office
A Day in the Life of a New Hampshire State Representative
The Challenges and Realities of Effective Regulation
Understanding the Personality and Competence of Politicians
Encouraging More People to Run for Political Office
9 Key Concepts
Overton Window
The range of policies considered politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. Political campaigns, especially in primaries, can significantly shrink this window by focusing on a narrow segment of voters.
Extrapolated Volition
What a person would want if they were fully rational, informed, and free from biases or momentary impulses. This concept helps differentiate between impulsive actions and a person's deeper, considered desires, influencing policy decisions like gambling legalization.
Leaving a Line of Retreat
A mental exercise that involves imagining one's most treasured belief is false and considering how one could still live a good, impactful life. This practice makes alternative worldviews thinkable and helps overcome the psychological difficulty of abandoning deeply held convictions.
Epistemically Toxic Self-Labeling
The act of strongly identifying with a specific ideology or group label, which can limit one's problem-solving approach to only consider solutions aligned with that label, rather than seeking the objectively best solution. It creates self-reinforcing biases and hinders open-mindedness.
Party Caucus
A meeting of members of a political party, typically held before a vote in a legislative body, where they discuss strategy, decide on a unified position, and receive recommendations from party leadership. This process often reinforces party line voting.
Political Capital
An intangible asset of goodwill, trust, and influence that a politician accumulates. It can be 'spent' to achieve policy goals, call in favors, or avoid negative outcomes like being primaried, and is gained through popularity, pleasing leadership, and strategic voting.
Public Choice Theory
An economic theory applied to political decision-making, which suggests that many laws and regulations tend to concentrate gains for a small, well-organized group while socializing the costs across a larger, diffuse population. This can lead to policies that degrade overall quality of life over time.
Dark Triad Traits
A cluster of three correlated personality traits: narcissism (grandiosity, sense of superiority), Machiavellianism (manipulativeness, cynicism), and psychopathy (callousness, impulsivity). These traits are observed to be higher than average in certain professions, including politics, though still represent a minority of individuals.
Scope Insensitivity
A cognitive bias where individuals fail to respond proportionally to the size or scale of a problem, often treating large numbers as 'just big numbers' without fully grasping their concrete implications. Politicians often exhibit this, leading to under-prioritization of issues affecting vast numbers of people.
10 Questions Answered
Campaigns typically target likely voters, especially primary voters within their party, which narrows down the issues and preferences they appeal to because it's hard to mobilize non-voters.
The views of people who vote are not necessarily representative of the population at large, as non-voters' preferences are not revealed, and highly active groups can have outsized influence on election outcomes.
It can be incredibly difficult, involving not just an epistemic shattering but also a social one, as one's social world may collapse, and others might accuse them of selling out or being brainwashed.
Party conformity exerts pressure at multiple stages, from the type of person who considers running, to the primary process, and then through party caucuses and leadership recommendations once in office, making it isolating for those with differing views.
The consequences depend on frequency, bill importance, and demeanor. While direct complaints might be rare, it can lead to negative outcomes like being primaried or receiving undesirable committee assignments.
It's a part-time role, typically from January through June, involving at least one day of committee meetings (public hearings and executive sessions) and one day for general assembly votes, which can last six to nine hours.
It's extremely hard because policymakers are often not experts in complex fields, experts can disagree, and there's a constant challenge of anticipating and countering attempts to find loopholes or take on new risks.
While there's some selection for Dark Triad traits (like narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) in higher offices, politicians are mostly just people, subject to human biases and incompetence, rather than pure malevolence.
Bradley Tusk's typology includes the corrupt politician (takes bribes), the narcissist (seeks praise and attention), the 'happy to be here' (wants office but no goals), the ideologue (true believer in a system), and the pragmatist (focused on specific achievements through compromise).
Individuals can make a difference by sponsoring or co-sponsoring bills, actively participating in committee meetings to influence outcomes, and giving speeches to the full body before votes, as individual votes rarely make a difference in large bodies.
24 Actionable Insights
1. Cultivate Epistemic Rigor
Actively seek out resources like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “sequences” to learn about cognitive biases and deconstruct them in yourself, aiming to be convinced by good arguments and unconvinced by bad ones.
2. Deconstruct Your Own Biases
Focus not just on learning about cognitive biases, but actively deconstructing them within your own thinking to challenge deeply held dogmas and ideologies.
3. Adopt Probabilistic Thinking
Shift from binary (true/false) thinking to probabilistic thinking, assigning probabilities to beliefs and continuously updating them with new information, making it easier to adjust beliefs when proven wrong.
4. Practice “Leaving Line Retreat”
Mentally explore what your life would be like if your most cherished beliefs were untrue, allowing alternatives to become thinkable and reducing the psychological difficulty of changing your mind.
5. Avoid Harmful Self-Labeling
Be cautious with self-labels (e.g., “libertarian,” “Democrat”) as they can be epistemically toxic, shrinking your possibility space and limiting the solutions you consider for problems. Instead, ask “what is the best solution?”
6. Avoid Identifying with Groups
To maintain epistemic flexibility and avoid the negative side effects of group identity (like avoiding hypocrisy or tribalism), try to avoid identifying with any specific political group.
7. Consider Running for Office
If you believe you could do better than current elected representatives, you likely can, as many politicians exhibit common human flaws like scope insensitivity or simple incompetence.
8. Prioritize Based on Scope
As a policymaker, intentionally prioritize issues that affect vast numbers of people over those affecting smaller groups, actively counteracting the natural human tendency towards scope insensitivity.
9. Seek Guidance for Running
If you are considering running for office, especially as a woman who might self-doubt, seek guidance from experienced individuals to assess if it’s a good personal fit.
10. Target Likely Voters
When shaping a campaign, focus on targeting likely voters, especially primary voters in your party, as mobilizing non-voters is much harder and less effective.
11. Mobilize Your Group’s Vote
If you are part of a politically active group, mobilizing all members to vote can have an outsized influence on election outcomes, especially at the local level.
12. Embrace Party Label
If you intend to run for office, you generally need to pick and embrace a party label to avoid being blocked or kicked out, especially within a two-party system.
13. Cultivate Pleasantness & Likeability
Actively try to be pleasant and well-liked by colleagues, especially if you anticipate having differing views or needing to vote against the party line, to counter negative perceptions.
14. Conserve Political Capital
Identify specific, important goals you can realistically achieve and focus your political capital on those; for other issues, “go along to get along” to maintain relationships and preserve capital.
15. Build Political Capital
Gain political capital by being popular, making donations to other campaigns, attending events, and generally being gracious and pleasant to be around.
16. Influence Policy Actively
To influence legislative outcomes, focus on sponsoring/co-sponsoring bills, actively participating in committee meetings to persuade members, and giving speeches to the full body before votes.
17. Prepare Thoroughly for Persuasion
To successfully persuade a committee, be extremely prepared by providing committee members with relevant information, sharing party-aligned articles during caucuses, and asking pointed questions to demonstrate expertise.
18. Strategically Deviate from Party
If you must vote against your party, do so judiciously, respectfully, and without flagrancy; sometimes abstaining (e.g., “taking a walk”) can avoid direct opposition on important votes.
19. Avoid Incumbents When Running
Focus on districts with open seats as running against an incumbent is generally “pretty pointless” and makes it harder to win.
20. Attend Local Party Meetings
Engage with local party meetings to discover open seats and build connections within your chosen party.
21. Door-to-Door Campaigning
For state-level political campaigns, going door-to-door is a valuable strategy to get face-to-face time with constituents, even with small budgets.
22. Recognize Public Choice Effects
Be aware that many laws and regulations tend to concentrate benefits for a small group while socializing costs across a larger population, driven by the incentives of those who benefit most.
23. Policymakers Consult Experts
When designing complex regulations, it is important for policymakers to listen to experts, acknowledging that experts can disagree and their expertise might be limited to specific domains.
24. Support Environmental Regulations
Regulations targeting widespread harms like environmental pollution (e.g., clean water and air) are often robust and successful in improving societal well-being.
6 Key Quotes
I ended up realizing that my dogma, my ideology up until that point was mostly driven by things like confirmation bias and that it was pretty unjustified and on very shaky grounds. And I had to sort of start from scratch and construct a new worldview.
Elizabeth Edwards-Appell
Imagine if your most treasured belief, the one that's closest to your heart, that you've built the most of your identity around, imagine if it wasn't true and what would that mean for your life.
Elizabeth Edwards-Appell
Going from binary thinking to probabilistic thinking is just such an incredible shift, right? It's so powerful. Like once you do it, it's like, wow, how could I ever think in binary?
Spencer Greenberg
I think that a huge reason why this happens a lot less than it did is that everything is so visible now. Like we have the 24/7 news cycle, we have C-SPAN broadcasting what's going on in the chambers live. And I think that that makes everybody much more worried about giving the appearance of seeding ground or looking weak or giving the other side ammunition.
Elizabeth Edwards-Appell
I think that some of the most robust regulations, the ones that have stood the test of time, are ones that don't try to prevent harms from occurring, but try to prevent like really sort of widespread bad things, like regulations that that that target environmental problems and pollutants and things like that.
Elizabeth Edwards-Appell
I think anybody who's listening to this podcast who has wondered to themselves like, could I do better than my elected representatives, the answer is yes, you absolutely could. It's not that hard to be better than replacement.
Elizabeth Edwards-Appell
1 Protocols
Influencing Committee Votes
Elizabeth Edwards-Appell- Be very prepared by printing out information ahead of time for every member on the committee and placing it in front of their chairs.
- Print out a separate article from a left-leaning news publication and share it just with your party during caucus to show that voting for the bill is an 'okay' Democratic position.
- During the public hearing, ask very pointed questions to demonstrate your familiarity with the topic.
- Right as the executive session begins, be ready to present your reasons for or against the bill, especially if the committee chair invites you to speak.
- Engage in a heated conversation if necessary, making your case and trying to convince other committee members to agree with you, even if they were originally planning to vote differently.