I recall EY commenting at some point that the way to make political progress is to convert intractable political problems into tractable technical problems. I think this kind of discussion would be more interesting and more profitable than a "traditional" mind-killing political debate.

It might be interesting, for example, to develop formal rationalist political methods. Some principles might include:

• Always conduct a comprehensive fact-gathering phase before beginning any policy discussion.
• Develop techniques to prevent people from becoming emotionally committed or status-linked to positions.
• Subject every statement to formal logical analysis; if the statement fails any obvious rule of logical inference, the statement is deleted and its author censured.
• Rigorously untangle webs of inference. A statement arguing against the death penalty should involve probability estimates of the number of crimes the penalty does (or does not) deter, the cost of administering it, etc, and connect these estimates to a global utility function. The statement must include analyses of how the argument changes in response to changes in the underlying probability estimates.