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This is: Towards a longtermist framework for evaluating democracy-related interventions, published by 22tom, Buhl on the AI Alignment Forum.
Many people have suggested that improving, safeguarding, or promoting liberal democracy should perhaps be a priority for longtermists. For example, 80,000 Hours lists improving institutional decision making, safeguarding liberal democracy and voting reform as potentially high-impact cause areas (Koehler, 2020). However, it remains unclear how high-priority these areas and specific interventions within them are, and why.
This post attempts to (1) tease apart different features of liberal democracy and (2) analyse how increasing or decreasing a society’s level of each feature would affect various potential intermediate goals for longtermists. By potential intermediate goals, we mean goals we could pursue to potentially increase the expected value of the far future, via four broad categories: existential risk reduction, trajectory changes, speeding up development, or “meta-longtermism” (Greaves and MacAskill, 2021)[1].
This is intended as a step towards a general framework for evaluating:
how high longtermists should want societies to be on each feature of liberal democracy
the positive or negative long-term effects of specific democracy-related interventions
the extent to which longtermists should in general prioritise causes or interventions related to liberal democracy
We also provide some initial thoughts on these points, and outline some directions for further research.
We hope this post, and possible future work building on this framework, could inform longtermism-inclined people who are interested in potentially researching or funding democracy-related interventions, are making career decisions, or are designing and implementing democracy-related interventions.
Key takeaways
The features of liberal democracy we identify in Section 1 are[2]:
Competitive democracy: There are free, fair, and competitive elections (representative and/or direct) and their results are peacefully implemented.
Accuracy: Politicians are elected in a way that accurately reflects the preferences of voters.
Responsiveness: Policy choices reflect the preferences of voters.
Participation: The public exercises their right to vote and participates in decision-making through avenues other than just voting.
Voter competence: The public is well-informed and are good decision-makers.
Liberalism: The power of the government is limited so as to preserve rule of law and individual rights, including minority rights.
Inclusion: Voting rights and other rights are extended to most or all of the population, and the interests of most or all beings are taken into account in decision-making.
In Section 2, we then discuss some ways those features may affect a set of seven potential intermediate goals for longtermists, as well as some positive or negative effects these potential goals may have on the long-term future. We suggest that:
Boosting most of the seven features of democracy identified may reduce great power conflict (though as with the other effects mentioned here, this is uncertain and depends on the context and details of the intervention). This in turn could potentially reduce existential risk and the risk of negative trajectory changes.
Increasing participation and liberalism may enhance intellectual progress, which could reduce existential risk (provided there is differential progress), speed up development, and help improve meta-longtermism.
Higher responsiveness & accuracy, liberalism and voter competence could speed up moral circle expansion, which in turn could make some existential risks less likely, speed up moral progress, and affect meta-longtermism.
Greater inclusion & participation in a competitive democracy could cause economic growth, which would impact exi...
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