Thread by @ezraklein

I liked this Rowing/Steering/Anchoring/Equity/Mutiny schema from Holden Karnofsky: cold-takes.com/rowing-steerin…

Some thoughts:

I'd like to see a lot more Steering in public debate, by which I mean more detailing of proposed far futures.

There's an opportunity for philanthropists and grant makers here. Journalism and academia undersupply Steering relative to its importance.

I think there's an obvious one Holden misses: Maintenance.

Sometimes the boat is going in a reasonable direction, or would be, but it's breaking down, or the crew is so poorly organized it can't make decisions, or even row effectively.

Those of us who focus on, say state capacity or democracy would fit here.

I'll take a moment here to plug the @NiskanenCenter's interesting new State Capacity project: niskanencenter.org/state-capacity…

My other critique is Holden frames these as separate and even competing orientations, and confusion between them as a generator of unnecessary disagreement.

That's surely sometimes right. But ideally, it's wrong.

I'd suggest people rarely truly just favor one or the other approach.

Better to think of these as an integrated framework where you should understand the answer to each question for your worldview, and the worldviews you're interested in or arguing with.

So you'd start by answering where you're trying to Steer. Do you even know?

Then: Does Rowing or Mutiny get you closer?

What Maintenance is needed to get there?

What does Equity look like between here and there?

What should you try and Anchor?

But you should read the piece! And this is probably a good place to plug my conversation with Holden from a few months back: nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opi…