The Case Against “Vibes Based” Policy
It is 2022 — why is public policy still based in guesswork?
Very broadly, political debates can be sorted into two categories:
- What should the world be like?
- How do we make it that way?
Arguments of the first type are intractable. No amount of science or data will tell us which rights we have. Science may tell us that people are born equals, or that random chance explains social inequality better than inherent goodness, but it cannot tell us what that means. It is possible, though contemptible, to argue for the abolition of human rights without violating a single law of science. As a result, such matters are left to human morality and human debates.
Fortunately for us, politics mostly tries to answer the second question.
Nearly every politician and political philosopher agrees, for example, that suffering should be minimized. How exactly to do that, however, is hotly contested. The leftist says suffering can be minimized by providing physical goods and services to those who need them. The liberal says it is best minimized by some form of market that happens to distribute those goods effectively. The conservative insists that suffering can only be mitigated by the actions of the sufferers or the freely-given charity of those around them. Though there is a type-1 dimension to each of these (especially the last), each group by-and-large insist that their goal is, in fact, to reduce suffering, no matter how strongly they differ.
For most of human history, type-two questions were also intractable. For lack of data, studies, sciences, and scientists, we largely had to guess how to achieve our social goals. Some theorists would try to make sweeping generalizations by examining history, while others would propose games of logic to mentally model what would happen should each solution be tried.
We can see this in the writings of everyone from Plato to Moore to Smith to Rand. For lack of data, these philosophers relied on vibes (be they in interpretations of history or game theory) to predict the outcomes of certain proposed solutions. Distasteful as I find some of their ideas, it is hard to fault this group or those like them. They had so little data and still, urgently, needed to solve the problems they faced.
Today, however, we rarely suffer such droughts of information. Scientists have worked for decades studying all kinds of social problems and proposed solutions. Though these studies are not flawless, we enjoy a wealth of information on social ills that is unparalleled in human history. Whether you want to solve drug abuse, climate change, child neglect, pandemics, malnutrition, homelessness, or even crime, there are thousands of scientists and hundreds of papers on each which are easily available and incredibly instructive.
The problems we don’t know how to solve, we know how to mitigate; and the problems we face most urgently, we know how to solve.
We know, for example, that providing free safe access to drugs in supervised sites, free healthcare, and stronger regulation of addictive prescription drugs (among other options) decreases drug use. We also know that moralizing, “tough love,” criminalization, and incarceration not only fail to stop drug use — they increase it! This has been studied dozens of times in different circumstances and the science is clear. In spite of this, the predominating view both in the halls of power and in society at large is the opposite: people believe, very strongly, that acceptance and social services increase drug use while cops and prisons decrease it.
A cynical explanation for the wide gulf between the scientific solutions and the politically feasible is that those in power are simply lying when they say they want to lower rates of drug use. The private prison industry is wealthy and powerful, and there is no shortage of authoritarians who see cops and prisons as a convenient means to repress their enemies, enforce their hierarchies, and ultimately, protect their power. This is, to me, obviously the case.
But what about the normal people who ignore science? How is it that otherwise kind and intelligent people can, even after being educated, commit themselves so freely to cruel and provably ineffectual policies?
I have two guesses.
For one, “vibes based policy” is, by definition, more tangible than the scientific alternative.
Take game theory for example — a method of predicting the causes of and solutions to social problems by imagining what the optimal move in a simplified version of the situation (a “game”) would be. Because these problems can be diagrammed and even “proven” mathematically, they are easy to digest and tempting to believe.
The error, of course, comes in the fact that no real-life situation is as simple as a mental game, and even more problematically, human beings rarely behave rationally. For example, although worsening the punishment for a crime would dissuade a rational actor from committing it, we know for a fact that harsher sentencing does not actually reduce crime rates. It only causes more suffering. If we cannot rely on the result of a game as simple as “are you more or less likely to steal if you would be executed for it?”, how can we possibly expect game theory and mental modeling to solve any problem?
My second guess for why people prefer vibes to science is simply that “science” is difficult to grasp and to trust.
Compared to the aforementioned logic games, which any person can consider, really understanding the conclusions of a scientific study requires literacy, patience, and trust. You must be able to read and understand their methodology, willing to bother reading the paper in the first place, and trusting that the scientists have not falsified their results.
This last point has been made more difficult by decades of misinformation presented by chemical, oil, and drug companies under the façade of scientific conclusions. Education in critical thinking skills and expanding the availability of scientific publications gives us a better shot at overcoming this particular hurdle, but no matter how you slice it, “vibes” will always be more accessible than science.
Science may tell us that funding police doesn’t lower crime rates (and that funding education does). Science may say that stopping the worst effects of climate change requires rapid decarbonization on a civilizational scale. Science may even give us easy, convenient, and cheap pathways to ending suffering altogether — but nobody seems to care.
I have no real solution to offer here. Science educators and communicators are actively working on these problems and perhaps they will find an answer. Until then, all I can do is ask that you be more careful when proposing, accepting, or imagining solutions to the myriad problems we face.
Odds are you can save yourself a lot of thinking — and the world a lot of suffering — if only you research before reaching policy conclusions.
