On Independence Day this year, I spent some time lamenting the impact of money on our political process here in the US.  As I always say, I follow Lawrence Lessig’s lead on this issue.  It seems that money purchases policy.  I support Rootstrikers in this regard, because they are working to fight this influence.  But I also wonder: why must it be so that money controls the voting of the public?  Shouldn’t the public be voting to advance their own self-interest?  (No laughter, please.)  Ananya Roy points out ways that this is actually true: middle class people vote more than poor people, and middle class housing credits receive ten times more money than housing for the poor.  But if it can be shown that money does consistently influence policy, then the public must be influenced to vote against their own self-interest in some cases.

Lessig would have us put limits on the amount of money spent.  That looks great on paper.  But it’s hard to take power away from the powerful.  So then I thought: well, maybe a public more critical of the media it consumes would be harder to manipulate into voting against their own self-interest (Or really taking any actions against their own self interest.).  Then the Situationists came to mind because I sort of like the mad way they expressed the spectacle of art imitating life imitating art in a sort of strange loop.  Not that I claim to really understand what the hell they or any of these French postmodernists are saying.   But, you know, it’s mind-bending in a recreational drug use sort of way.  Debord seems to show that media representations supplant lived experience, leading to mediated relationships between people.  Society’s focus shifts from being something to having something to appearing to have something.  Bling, bling, etc.

My point being that it’s sort of nontrivial to promote critical media consumption.  How do we even divide our very identities and relationships from the media we consume?  Or do we even need to do that?  Shouldn’t we be critical of ourselves too?  But anyway, then I decided that really I should go even more meta, from promoting media criticism to promoting rationality itself.  The Center For Applied Rationality is already in the business of doing this.  But the average person watching 20–30 hours of television a week isn’t going to shell out for some weekend rationality retreat.  CFAR seems to be aiming at the elite of super-rationalists, which makes sense if the goal is to recruit Friendly AI builders.  But what about the poor schmucks getting suckered into voting for corn subsidies that end up killing them with diabetes from all the resulting cheap high fructose corn syrup?

So then I thought, well, maybe someone could take the CFAR rationality checklist*, which has some concrete examples of how to think more rationally, and convert it into some simple Lolcat-style memes.  Well, I asked around, and I guess this is being tried already: http://prettyrational.com.  The problem is that prettyrational.com is only funny if you already know Bayes’ theorem.  What the world needs is more like a rationalist version of Grumpy Cat or Honey Badger or something.  Seriously.  What if the decision making of those in the bottom percentiles of rationality could be improved just a little bit by spreading some simple rules of thumb.  Consider this one from that CFAR checklist:

I notice when my mind is arguing for a side (instead of evaluating which side to choose), and flag this as an error mode.

But you know, uh, punch it up a little and put a cat in there or something.  Anyway, that’s what Rootstrikers should really switch its focus to: making memes to increase rationality so that the plutocrats can throw all the money they want around, but the public will be too savvy to get their cognitive bias buttons pushed.  So all you hilarious rationalists out there (both of you) get yourselves over to Meme Generator and crank out something to benefit society.

* That CFAR checklist is worth reading, by the way.  One unexpected conclusion that I draw from it is that having a healthy self-esteem will make it easier to be rational.

This Independence Day I find myself actually feeling patriotic and thinking back to those scrappy Englishmen that dared defy their king.  Then I think of all the other brave immigrants like my own great grandparents that boldly sought out a better future in an unfamiliar land that claimed to be free.  Land of the free, home of the brave.  A day to declare independence.

To be sure, we are not the same Americans that wrenched this land from the British monarchy and demanded a Bill of Rights be added to our Constitution.  I don’t mean in the Homeric sense that we are lesser beings, though that may well be true.  I mean our situation is dramatically different.  This is a settled land with hundreds of years of momentum behind the current government.  This is not that wild place at he far edge of the civilized world where Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality could take hold far from the oppressive monarchs of old Europe.

So I have no right to be disappointed in my fellow fat, comfortable Americans who are failing to rise up and demand the immediate repeal of the Patriot Acts and restoration of the Bill of Rights.  I shouldn’t be infuriated that our president is framing this issue as a balance between freedom and security.  We are a rich nation now, we have too much to lose.  We don’t have the backbone to stick with old Ben Franklin and point out that those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither.

Ah well, what can we do?  It’s a shame because this old system of ours has such good bones.  The whole balance of power thing between the judicial, executive, and legislative branches.  Quite clever, really. There are allowances for decisive action, which as any observer of decision-by-committe knows, only an individual actor can undertake. There is a Congress to voice the diverse views of the people and harvest whatever wisdom the crowds may possess, and finally the courts to keep the entire thing grounded on the rule of law.  I would even suggest that Yudkowsky try to bake these ideas into his CEV when he builds the Godlike AI that will rule the universe.

But it seems clear that monied interests have captured our political process.  I am with Lessig on this, drastic campaign reform might be the only way to salvage this democracy.*  His Rootstrikers group has joined with Demand Progress.  I do believe that some of the folks who take a look at this post do have backbones and intelligence.  I encourage those of you who don’t happen to be bootlickers to rouse yourselves somewhat and see what you can do to help rectify this declining state of ours.  Every empire must fall, I don’t deny that, but this one might have a few more miles left on it.  Transparency, rule of law, and individual freedom are some of the ideas that led to the ascendence of the West.  I suspect that we discard them at our peril.

* The mechanism by which this occurs is annoying. Money seems to buy policy via campaign donations. Which suggests that whoever has the most money will win an election (Though I haven’t seen the data on this, I should look it up.). If most of the money is spent on advertising, then rich people are basically controlling the mindspace of voters. I guess this is always true of various forms of advertising and mass media in general really, but it makes me resolved to more completely unplug from the mind control device. Also, someone clearly needs to develop a virus to deliver whatever genetic mutation is required to make the general public into critical thinkers capable of discerning which ads are garbage. Get George Church on the phone.

You know, maybe I was too hard on Lanier‘s idea that people should get paid for the use of their personal data.  Sure, it seems far-fetched right now, but it would pose an interesting solution to this NSA PRISM privacy scandal.  At one point in ‘Who Owns the Future” Lanier suggests that citizens could set a price on their data.  So whoever wanted a copy of it, would need to actually pay the citizen who created that data directly.  Lanier even considers the consequences of criminals trying to game the system:

A criminal who sets a high price on his data to avoid being tracked while committing a crime will find himself owing that amount if law enforcement has to get a warrant to track him in order to gain a conviction. On the other hand, if law enforcement doesn’t get a conviction, the price of the data will be taken out of a department’s budget. This balance of power can be tweaked to find a reasonable sweet spot generally balancing police effectiveness and civil liberties protection. Maybe the police would only owe up to a fixed limit, unlike civilian actors. However, a reasonable, intermediate solution to the quandary of access to digital information would come about without requiring constant reinterpretation.

Lanier, Jaron (2013-05-07). Who Owns the Future? (p. 304). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

He’s really proposing a market based solution here, which should theoretically appeal to libertarians and other capitalists.  Of course my main gripe is that it’s hard to build a market from scratch.  Also, the NSA aren’t really law enforcement people.  It actually seems less incendiary for the FBI to be snooping on us since they theoretically are steeped in due process and rule of law.  The NSA are more like military guys.  They don’t need no stinkin’ badges.  Though I guess the recent spying is actually A-OK from a legal point of view due to the Patriot Act.  Good luck getting that monstrosity declared unconstitutional with the current Supreme Court lineup.

But suppose that anyone who wanted access to your data actually played by Lanier’s rules and paid you some amount for it.  This would be a pretty decent solution.  The NSA would need to wedge another line item onto their top-secret budget, and in theory, this would force them to be somewhat more discriminating about who they wanted to snoop on.  Also, we would all get a nano payment and some notification that we were being watched and by whom.  This is a far better scenario than the current one and it does have the virtues of being market based and scalable.  Such a good idea, but really, really hard to see how it gets instantiated.  Think on this you smart people who care about privacy!