Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why I Am Not in Charge, published by Zvi on the LessWrong. Epistemic Status: Long piece written because the speed premium was too high to write a short one. Figured I should get my take on this out quickly. (Note: This has been edited to reflect that I originally mixed up UpToDate with WebMD (since it’s been years since I’ve used either and was writing quickly) and gave the impression that WebMD was a useful product and that my wife liked it or used it. I apologize for the mix-up, and affirm that WebMD is mostly useless, but UpToDate is awesome.) Scott Alexander has a very high opinion of my ability to figure things out.. It’s quite the endorsement to be called the person that first comes to mind as likely things right. Scott even thinks it would hypothetically be great if I was the benevolent dictator or secretary of health, as my decisions would do a lot of good. In turn, I have a very high opinion of Scott Alexander. If you get to read one person on the internet going either forwards or backwards, I’d go with Scott. Even as others are often in awe of my level (and sometimes quality) of output, I have always been in awe of his level and quality of output. His core explanation in one paragraph: I have a much easier task than those in charge. All I have to do is get the right answer, without worrying (anything like as much) about liability or politics or leadership, or being legible, or any number of other things those with power and responsibility have to worry about lest they lose that power and responsibility and/or get sued into oblivion. Those with power have to optimize for seeking power and play the game of Moloch, and we need to pick a selection process that makes this the least destructive we can and thus can only rely on legible expertise, and we actually kind of do a decent job of it. In that spirit, I’d like to welcome everyone coming here from Astral Codex Ten, flesh out and make more explicit my model of the dynamics involved, and point out some of the ways in which I think Scott’s model of the situation is wrong or incomplete. Which in turn will be partly wrong, and only be some of the ways in which it is wrong or incomplete, as my model is also doubtless wrong and incomplete. The core disagreement between my model and Scott’s model is that Scott’s model implicitly assumes people with power have goals and are maximizing for success given those goals. I do not believe this. More broadly, Scott assumes a generalized version of the efficient market hypothesis, or that people are efficiently producing a bundle of goods at the production possibilities frontier, because to do better in some way they’d have to sacrifice in another – if you want better policies you’ll have to pay political capital for it, and you only have so much political capital, whereas there aren’t free wins lying around or someone would have taken them. Again, I think this is incorrect. There’s treasure everywhere. The other core disagreement is revealed most explicitly in the comments, when Scott is asked what the mysterious ‘force of power’ is that would work to take me down if Biden decided to put me in charge. Scott’s answer is ‘someone like but not as high quality as Dr. Fauci’ would take me out, which is a plausible figurehead of such an effort, but I think the real answer is most everyone with power, implicitly acting together. I’ve divided this post into sections that correspond to Scott’s sections, so my Section I comments on Scott’s Section I. I I think Scott’s diagnosis of WebMD is mostly spot on. I know this because my wife is a psychiatrist and when I wrote the original version of this I remembered ‘yeah, the online website she uses is great’ and somehow thought it was WebMD. Which it wasn’t. UpToDate is the useful website that actually works and manages to provide useful in...