Most of the general population is incensed about most things, most of the time. I've stopped caring. Why don't you?
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.
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
"Though it's a side issue, what's even more... interesting.... is the way that our brains simply haven't updated to their diminished power in a super-Dunbarian world. We just go on debating politics, feverishly applying our valuable brain time to finding better ways to run the world, with just the same fervent intensity that would be appropriate if we were in a small tribe where we could persuade people to change things."
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...
As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.