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MatthewB comments on Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions - Less Wrong
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I would love to stop caring. It is indeed a wonderful suggestion.
However, many of those people who would be offended by such things, also get offended by many, much less offensive things, things which often may cause a loss of liberty to others... And they vote.
I do think it would behoove me to maybe turn up my apathy just a bit, as my near term future will have a lot more to say about my survival and ultimate value than worrying about a bunch of human cattle who like to get all bothered about things as trivial as the shape of the moon (absurd example)
Does your worrying about and discussing what other people believe contribute more to changing the outcome of their voting, or to other things, like personal payoff of social interaction while having the discussions about people of lower status according to this metric? Overestimating importance of personally discussing politics for policy formation is a classical mistake.
See also: Dunbar's Function
I see that I may be caught up in this mistake a bit. Some of my discussing is simply to gather information about what a typical person of a demographic might believe. It's mostly confirming what I might have read about in a poll, or that data from a website shows.
Some times the discussion gets to the point where I try to change an attitude, and I keep tripping over myself when I do this, as few people will change their attitudes, political and/or religious without some form of emotional connection with the reason to change.
This is sort of why I am here. I wish to stop using my valuable brain time to convince people of things which I haven't a hope of changing, and do something else which may contribute to the good of society in a more direct way.
I am a mess of paranoid contradictions gathered from a mis-spent youth, and I wish to untangle some of that irrationality, as it is an intellectual drag on my progress.