Beware Policy Abstraction - by Robin Hanson

The recent US presidential election should be fresh enough in your memory to let you directly confirm that the issues focused on there were biased in two key ways. First, they were issues that mattered more in “swing” states, due to the US electoral college voting system. And second, they were more “cultural” issues, which are more vague, aspirational, and hypocritical, have more emotion and symbolism, and are more aligned with key identities and alliances, and fights between those. 

It seems to me that another key correlate of “cultural” issue is abstraction. Issues that are framed more abstractly, in a near-far sense, are more easily made culturally salient. While such issues may well have relevant concrete statistics and track records, some key part of their appeal is not tied to such concrete measures. 

For example, when IVF first became feasible, it was a hotly contested cultural issue. But then as people gained experience with it, the debated faded, until today it is a non issue. Regulation tends to go far better when it responds to a concrete track record of prior problems, than when it tries to prevent an abstract space of imagined harms. 

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