Hinge Facts that Flip Policy
Cut through signaling by finding the least networked fact that inverts your policy positions
Ideally, most of my political beliefs should be falsifiable. They don’t have to be purely factual—politics is about oughts—but every ought that proposes an intervention is a transform on the current world. If a policy maps is to ought, it carries implicit empirical claims about how the world behaves under that transform. When those claims update, the policy should, too.
This is easily derailed, since politics is also an identity performance. “I won’t be moved” is a valuable display of who you are and what you believe. Further, there’s utility in not using game theory to recursively moderate yourself when selecting the best match during primaries. Once we get to the general election, that opportunity has passed. For a quarter century, I’ve entertained that losing votes is deserved electoral punishment for compromising with the center. It has not moved the needle.
Another obfuscator of policy is our need for agency over luck. We need stories that tell us we made it here through free will. Even if free will is philosophically untenable, believing in it gives you more of whatever it looks like. If I got rich, I earned it and the system that put me there is just. Dare disagree? You’ve self-labeled as an underachiever. If I lost weight, anyone can do it and obesity is entirely a willpower issue. If I found a mate, there are no structural dating difficulties and you’re an incel. Basically, “If I can do it, anyone can.” Even if you worked hard, the quip implies you should be the cutoff point. Why should everyone with slightly less willpower or a harder journey than you be relegated to failure?
You can hear when policy talk mutates into a mating or strength display. There are sincere arguments in favor of immigration. “[I’m so valuable to the labor market that] I welcome competition from immigrants” is not one of them. It’s entirely a claim of personal prowess that cleverly says absolutely nothing about what’s good or bad for your countrymen or for immigrants. A sincere case sounds different. Aging populations need workers to support retirees; complementary skills raise productivity; immigrants start firms at higher rates. We need a way to avoid the former in favor of the latter if we’re going to discuss policy as a transform.
Opinions on tax policy are often shared with similar motivation. If you’re destitute but want to display resilience and belief in hard work, you can express this by advocating for lower taxes for the rich. Not to say you should only vote to enrich yourself, but this is Rawls Gone Wild. The coastal elite often do the opposite and boast they can afford high taxes, so bring them on. Neither stance sincerely engages with how to create a society that balances incentives for success with human flourishing and limited poverty.
The same “if I can do it…” impulse often hardens into rules that favor people like us. Granted, a society should see success delivered in proportion to effort. We don’t like to see the less skilled or lazier outperform us. When this gets too personal, it can drive overly specific regulatory breakpoints. We want to change the difficulty settings of life so everyone less shrewd struggles more than we do. The fantasy is: if these regulations were removed, I would be more successful. My hands wouldn’t be tied.
An important caveat for policy is that regulations may not be nannying the weak, but blunting the edge of the very skilled. You think their removal will let you eat more, but perhaps you will more easily get eaten. This is most evident when people who move to unincorporated areas to escape the city’s grasp wake up to a noisy datacenter next door. Suddenly, they’re clamoring for the reinstatement of the rules that let them shoot fireworks once a bigger noisemaker rolls in.
We all know what it feels like to be cross-pressured on individual issues to keep membership in our tribe. No need to go into that. The point is that these failure modes keep us from debating what’s best for the country—independent of the accident of our birth, how we see ourselves, or how we want others to see us.
If I can admit my policy can be updated by fact, then it’s valuable to find the least-networked fact that’d cause me to reverse beliefs. This will cut through all these described problems at once without having to overcome or abandon my human need to advertise my principles. Once we agree on our smallest breakpoint, we can figure out if one of us is missing facts. If we agree on what’s good and what’s true, it’s rare we’ll disagree on what to do.
In the spirit of induction over deduction, let’s jump right into controversial ones.
Could I skew more authoritarian? I think so, if freedom-to starts infringing on freedom-from in a lot more situations due to limited resources or space. Population density plays a big role. Look at our attitude shift when we get on a plane, crowded subway, or stadium. We clap and cheer for a crackdown on any disobedience that inconveniences us. It doesn’t matter if the person ejected was unjustly bumped due to overbooking; we want them gone so we can get to our destination. Supporting righteous protest seems heavily dependent on how directly impacted we are.
Could I be against mandatory vaccination? I consider it the price of entry to fragile, planned, high-density civilization. Knowing the history of plagues wiping out many percent of the world’s population, this is tough. Government heavily coordinates to regulate the safety of many people living in close proximity. Pile people up and it can make demands of them for their safety: fire-lane widths, sprinklers, building codes, noise ordinances, idling limits, quarantine powers, grease traps, refuse storage. All are checks against density-enabled calamities. I could flip if disease transmission were very low, or not require it for residents who don’t enter the city, or if we compelled mandatory indoor ventilation instead.
What would move me on questions of nontraditional gender or sexuality? I’m broadly neutral, but would I feel differently as a parent? Parents express a strong desire for grandchildren I can’t quite relate to. If technology reliably preserved fertility, would that change their view? The concern of never becoming a grandparent is normally a gradual, decades-long worry. Does transition time-integrate this low-grade worry into a single overwhelming moment of loss they express as rage? Posing modifiers to surface the hinge fact—fertility, reversibility, long-term well-being—may illuminate objections that are otherwise poorly articulated.
Could I pivot to being against civil liberties like freedom to use encryption in private communication or cryptocurrency in dealings? Possibly, if large syndicates used both to run distributed, organized crime. Once it reached some threshold, like surpassing traditional categories of theft and fraud in aggregate losses, I would consider it. Is this the current thinking of those against encryption? They may have a significant misperception about the nature or quantity of human trafficking that crime stats do not reflect. Fixing that misperception may open them to supporting encryption.
How about stricter immigration laws? I see immigration as an instrumental economic issue. Obviously the number we want is neither zero nor open borders, so binary good-versus-evil framing is self-defeating. My current view is based on the premise that even those from lower-trust, always-defect countries will arrive slowly enough to notice we are an always-cooperate environment and adapt. This is the magic in “magic dirt theory.” If there is evidence of this collapsing, I could support increasing restrictions.
Could I relax my environmentalist bent? Seeing resource consumption arguments against AI helped me understand why I hold my own positions. I consider the fuel spent to instantiate artificial minds the runway required to launch our civilization. I’d probably think the same during the Industrial Revolution. We’ve done runway before: sewer systems, rural electrification—large, messy up-front costs that made everything else possible. Why do I never see that obvious framing from those arguing for fewer environmental protections? It’s always collapsed to an is by claiming it’s not happening at all. If real numbers showed sequestration technology truly hampered development, and not just reduced profits, I’d take a hard look. Overly moralizing cap-and-trade in the ‘00s cost us policy we’d be thrilled to have now.
Whatever we believe about what the world ought to be, any action we take is ultimately a transform against that world. Finding what would have to change to prevent your transform from applying correctly is a good way of diagnosing both your model and your policy. It keeps the argument about the world, not about us.
I like how you framed it. Good examples too. The dream of more rational citizens/voters ...