The policy wonk gradient

As you move from top to bottom, people’s worldviews become less fleshed out. Most people have a worldview, and thus a few topics they care about. Fewer people have selected topic measurements for monitoring those topics. Even fewer people have strong beliefs about what the determinants are for their topic measurements.

The choice/logic gradient

As you move from top to bottom, things become less of a personal choice. People can argue about what our choices of topics and topic measurements should be, but they are personal choices at the end of the day. But determinants aren’t personal choices — if you want to be correct, they have to reflect reality.

The leading/lagging indicator gradient

Indicators towards the bottom are more leading and input-like, while indicators towards the top are more lagging and output-like.

Worldview differences

What are some ways that worldviews can be different?

Topic differences

People care about different things:

(They can also care about the same things but weight them differently — this is discussed later in the post.)

Topic measurements

Two people can both have the equality topic in their worldview but select different ways to measure it:

Determinants

Two people can have the same topic and topic measurement but differ in their beliefs about what has a causal relationship with the topic measurement (note the different direction indicators in the links between the murder rate and gun ownership.):

Benefits of the format

The benefits for the viewholder are:

A more rigorous worldview

It becomes easier to process news and analysis — for example, if someone writes an article saying labor force participation is too low, how does that manifest in the things I care about? Another example is displaying the projected impacts of a particular policy proposal across all aspects of your worldview

The benefits for a reader of a worldview are:

Faster and more comprehensive understanding

Easier to compare worldviews

Website

So far, I’ve just been talking about a format — you could use it just by writing your worldview down on a piece of paper. But, like many things, it would be better to have these worldviews centralized online, where people can keep an always-up-to-date, canonical version of their worldview available for sharing.

Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now provides data for the topic measurements and determinants that make up his worldview, at the point of the book being published. There is currently not an easy way to track this data over time. I shouldn’t have to wait and rely on a new edition of his book to be published to see how Pinker’s worldview is interpreting the new state of the world. This is something the website would address — in addition to just displaying the worldview in the format, it would also show the current (and historical) data for the topic measurements and determinants.

Here’s an example worldview held by an Australian, with some actual data being displayed (a DALY is a “disability-adjusted life year” — a measure of overall disease burden, expressed as the number of years lost due to ill-health, disability or early death):

The website could allow for easy delegation — for example, if you care about the environment but don’t have the time or desire to select topic measurements and determinants, you could easily delegate those to an organization you trust, such as the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy. Or someone who doesn’t know much about economics could delegate the selection of economics-related determinants (e.g., would an increase in the minimum wage have an impact on unemployment?) to the IGM Economic Experts Panel. You could even delegate certain things to prediction markets (something like “if the prediction market indicates that increasing the minimum wage would have an impact on unemployment, add it as a determinant”).

The website would make it easy to quickly compare two different worldviews, and show you exactly where they overlap and where they differ.

The website would also provide the fundamental benefits of digitally structuring information. Worldviews, and every component thereof, would have a canonical home, easily linked to and shared — imagine being able to say “here is a link to my view on inequality — it will always be up-to-date”.

Lastly, the website would track any worldview changes over time.

Now that we have established the concept of displaying the actual values for the topic measurements, we can talk about another way that worldviews can differ — two people can have the same topic, topic measurement, determinant, but differ in what they think the value of the determinant is. A recent example is the debate on what percentage of bankruptcies are caused by medical problems:

Indexes

Topic measurements and determinants have a number, by definition. Topics themselves don’t, by default, have a number, but it’s possible to give them one by combining the topic measurements into an aggregate number, otherwise known as an index. Here is part of The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom (IEF) for Australia (truncated for space):

Indexes can also encompass an entire worldview — here is the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) for Australia:

Indexes make it much easier to track progress over time and compare regions. They also make it much quicker to create the first draft of a worldview — for example, you could simply add the Democracy Index, Human Freedom Index, Environmental Performance Index, and the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index as your topics, and over time update the weightings between them and add/remove items.

Indexes also force the viewholder to assign weights to the elements in their worldview, which makes them more rigorous. Currently, most indexes avoid this rigor by simply assigning equal weights to their components, but at least that creates a starting point for discussing trade-offs. The website would make indexes clearer and easier to understand by displaying these weights. It would also allow viewholders to easily edit the weightings and details of existing indexes to create their own indexes, or build their own from the ground up by asking questions about the trade-offs they are willing to make.

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Freeform words, with little to no structure (like an essay), make the act of communicating a worldview easier, but make reading and comparing worldviews harder, and leaves room for ambiguity. Documenting a worldview in this new format will be hard — you lose the flexibility that freeform words provide. But the clarity would be worth the effort.

The new format focuses on desired policy outcomes, and totally ignores politics and politicians altogether. It’s not that those things are unimportant, but rather that the format is intended to serve as an alternative way to engage with and think about politics, not as a replacement. We’ll always have long essays, soaring rhetoric, and personal political attacks. But as long as those things also include numbers, we should experiment with new ways to communicate these views.