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Pendulums, Policy-Level Decisionmaking, Saving State — LessWrong

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One excellent, quick-and-dirty models of social change is the mental image of a pendulum swinging back and forth around a central resting point. Imagine that the pendulum is “stuck” at some point. For instance, in many parts of America in the early 1900s, marriages were viewed as essentially inviolable, and divorce was tantamount to social suicide. Eventually, people began to realize that there was something bad about this—for instance, people being stuck forever in loveless marriages that they entered into with very little information when they were teenagers—and they agitated to "push" the pendulum to a new set point. Generally speaking, that new point is better than the original one. It’s less distant from the ideal. It contains less total badness overall (or at least, we hope so). But that new stuck point comes with its own problems. For instance, maybe we’ve traded “lots of people trapped in marriages that are net-negative” for “lots of people who never reap the benefits of what

x Pendulums, Policy-Level Decisionmaking, Saving State — LessWrong CFAR Handbook Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) Rationality Frontpage 32 Pendulums, Policy-Level Decisionmaking, Saving State by CFAR!Duncan 11th Aug 2022 10 min read 3 32 Pendulums "Remember back when we used to talk about pendulums too little?" One excellent, quick-and-dirty models of social change is the mental image of a pendulum swinging back and forth around a central resting point. Imagine that the pendulum is “stuck” at some point. For instance, in many parts of America in the early 1900s, marriages were viewed as e

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