Why Are Evidence-Based Politics Broken?

[mjpc88]

In the beginning of everyone's life, nobody is born with a network of surveillance equipment which records everything that goes on around them. By default, people are vulnerable to being abused and neglected by others who hide behind plausible deniability. Still, some people are born with more access to surveillance than others. Whether because their parents record their surroundings, their neighborhood is well surveyed, they're more compatible among their peers than others such that their peers are willing to give testimony, or because in the beginning of their life they're safe enough to accumulate access, access to surveillance is not an equal scenario.

Even more importantly is the "proven lifestyle" problem. Everyone in society is not born simultaneously. Therefore, some people will have an opportunity to prove their lifestyles work before others. This in turn creates a conformity problem where people born later are expected to conform to the lifestyles of the past or else they get labeled as being utopian for seeking to practice an unproven way of life.

Lastly, there's a data problem. The data which gets recorded about lifestyles is only available for previously practiced ways of life, and that data is subject to corruption from abuse and negligence. In other words, the models we generate based on evidence is never really precise. It gets taken with a pragmatic grain of salt as the least-wrong way of dealing with natural imperfections.

This pragmatism, however, is subject to self-fulfilling prophecies. People start to anticipate what ways of life are surveyed, and what ways of life might evoke abuse and negligence from others. In turn, they don't bother even trying to practice certain ways of life because they anticipate the data required to prove those ways of life work won't even get the opportunity to be presented.

This anticipation creates certain equilibria in social games which yield certain outcomes while gathered data is subject to these equilibria, reiterating itself over and over across time. This creates a paradoxical chaotic order or harmony where those particular ways of life which have an advantage in surveillance become the general expectation across society. Deviating from this harmony is treated as disruptive even though this harmony itself is disruptive.

I say this especially across intergenerational gaps where the awareness of harmony changes over time. Those who practiced it in the past die, and part of practicing harmony is you don't record everything about the harmony you practice. Every ounce of energy recording evidence about facts is an ounce of energy not spent living facts. To partake in harmony, you must not record harmony... except in this state of surveillance, some bits of harmony are recorded while other bits are not.

This creates a framing problem across generations where future generations don't understand exactly what the past did, so even if it does live by the evidence of the past, that evidence is not going to precisely portray what happened. More importantly, a communication problem arrives within future generations where the partial evidence of the past gets dissected once more. Those bits which are simplest to communicate get prioritized which means the partial truth of the past becomes even more partial.

This is why the reconstruction argument of evidence-based diversity doesn't really work. Some will argue that because of this framing problem, the future has a chance to correct what the past got wrong, but it also has a chance to get what the past got wrong even MORE wrong. The chance of correction will at least get cancelled out if not overwhelmed by the chance to get things more wrong because by learning from experience, the future is not able to independently imagine what parts of the past's story are being left out. It can either roll the dice randomly, or it can manipulate the facts in alternate ways.

The problem is chaos doesn't work this way. Chaos over time diverges. It doesn't converge. Neither rolling the dice randomly nor manipulating the facts alternatively will yield truth very often. Far more often, falsehoods will compound upon falsehoods. Society ends up with a junkyard, not a museum. Trying to generate order from this chaos is a fool's errand. The only order to be had from it is predictable conflict where mockeries battle fellow mockeries. The mere display of truth, which is inevitable since those facts which do get discovered would be required to be proven, automatically gets targeted out of envy.

Even worse, these targets when recorded don't find justice. Evidence by itself does not yield justice. You can have proof of abuse and negligence in society, and have people who are cowardly and/or careless. Some will be too afraid to do what it takes to enforce what evidence suggests. Others will be plain apathetic. Some will jump on the bandwagon of wrongdoers to gang up against victims. Others will actively make an example out of victims for the sadistic fun of it.

I want to be clear that none of this has anything to do with believing in God, a soul, an afterlife, organized religion, etc. You can be a full-fledged atheist and still understand everything previously described whether for moral or immoral intentions. Likewise, there are plenty of evidence-based religious people out there who take advantage of the problems described here anyway whether to get away with their own abuse or to neglect others in their own congregations who get abused by others whether within or beyond their congregations.

This is simply based on the origins of the human condition starting with how nobody is born with a network of surveillance equipment throughout society, different people have different access to surveillance, some people are born before others, and there are social games which people play in worrying about what facts will be recorded.