Why Policy?

A Short Story of How I Got Here

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

~Ronald Reagan

Why am I in DC? Why, of all things in the world, do I think ML policy is the most important thing I could be doing with my life?

The answer comes in three parts of my life. In high school and university, the main question I wanted to answer about humanity is the question of self-deception. Why do people lie in seemingly random ways, even taking their lies very seriously to the point of ruining their lives? The evolutionary answer is that these kinds of lies would benefit them as hunter-gatherers. Robin Hanson’s book the Elephant in the Brain makes a similar case, that truth and rationality is often used as a pretense for these evolutionary drives. I began to see these kinds of lies as human weather: patterns that were not centrally planned or coordinated, but could be studied in a scientific way. 

I still had many practical questions. How do you stop people from shooting themselves in the foot with self-deception? What social structures reduced the burden of human weather? Friend groups and communities were initially on my mind, but academics asking the same questions about businesses and governments interested me just as much. And despite everything, I was happy with life. It seemed like the Western world had a way of mitigating every problem of human nature to the extent that most people could have safe, interesting, and prosperous lives. The message I took away was that it was possible, but never guaranteed, to overcome human weather. 

At this point, I was still a run-of-the-mill mathematician and software engineer. I had an interest in machine learning as an academic field and as a hobby, which was very fortunate in hindsight. So to answer these questions, I started writing and podcasting, and soon successfully applied for funding to travel to events on top of that. As it turns out, I found the right time to ask questions about human weather. Unexpectedly, my second career took off. 

The third arc of my life sees all of my thinking around technical and human problems coalesce into doing something in the world. I’m not saying that making minor improvements to machine learning code isn’t a worthwhile and well compensated job. But I worry about the precedent of the nuclear engineer. A kid interested in nuclear engineering had a promising career at the cutting edge of science, producing something everyone needed (electricity). All the long-term market indicators were positive. By around the time that student graduated and got a bit of experience, human weather would have washed his entire career down the drain. Histrionic, sensationalist stories captured the media. Anti-nuclear activists dedicated their lives to their low-iq misunderstanding of the underlying technology. And the government sided with them. Republican Gerald Ford signed the nuclear regulatory commission into existence in 1974. They proceeded to completely ban the construction of nuclear power plants up until last year. 

There is no efficient market in votes. Present-day media lends itself to the wild fluctuations in belief. Sensationalism and paranoia has completely changed what one or both parties think about vaccines, social media, energy, or military preparedness in a matter of months. Do not expect politicians to support a policy just because it is true, helps their voters, or helps their immediate self-interest. 

Do not expect industries to play self-defense effectively. The divide between silicon valley and DC is real. A solid majority of founders and engineers I spoke to know literally nothing, not a single thing, about legislation proposed that could directly impact their companies. The free market is too busy to defend itself from its enemies. There is no NATO for tech. 

The system that mitigates human weather has to be renewed with each era and each technology. Among my generation, I see great passion and ability for innovation, research, and entrepreneurship. It is much rarer to see the will to defend the basic freedoms we enjoy today for future generations and future industries. Within the world of policy, histrionics and careerism are more common than genuinely held philosophical belief. Still, rare virtue and no virtue result in very different systems. This makes it possible, but never guaranteed, to overcome human weather. That, if anything, is worth fighting for □