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cupholder comments on Open Thread: May 2010 - Less Wrong
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Comments (543)
Upvoted your comment for asking in the first place.
If your post was a novel explanation of some aspect of rationality, and wasn't just about landing punches on libertarianism, I'd want to see it. If it was pretty much just about criticizing libertarianism, I wouldn't.
I say this as someone very unsympathetic to libertarianism (or at least what contemporary Americans usually mean by 'libertarianism') - I'm motivated by a feeling that LW ought to be about rationality and things that touch on it directly, and I set the bar high for mind-killy topics, though I know others disagree with me about that, and that's OK. So, though I personally would want to downvote a top-level post only about libertarianism, I likely wouldn't, unless it were obnoxiously bare-faced libertarian baiting.
I agree on most counts.
However, I'd also enjoy reading it if it were just a critique of libertarianism but done in an exceptionally rational way, such that if it is flawed, it will be very clear why. At minimum, I'd want it to explicitly state what terminal values or top-level goals it is assuming we want a political system to maximize, consider only the least convenient possible interpretation of libertarianism, avoid talking about libertarians too much (i.e. avoid speculating on their motives and their psychology; focus as much as possible on the policies themselves), separate it from discussion of alternatives (except insofar as is necessary to demonstrate that there is at least one system from which we can expect better outcomes than libertarianism), not appear one-sided, avoid considering it as a package deal whenever possible, etc.
That standard sounds pretty weird. If it is so clear that it is flawed, wouldn't you expect it to be clear to the author and thus not posted? Perhaps you mean clear what your core disagreement is?