Good writing style!

By which you mean, I suppose, that my skill as a rhetorician has exceeded my skill as a rationalist. Well, you may be right. Supposing you are, what do you suggest I do about it?

I do think you are glorifying democracy.

Well, yes, I am. Not our democracy, not any narrow technique for promoting democracy, but democracy as the broad principle that people should have a decisive say in the decisions that affect them strikes me as pretty awesome. I guess I might be claiming benefits for democracy in excess of what I have evidence to support, and that if I were an excellent rationalist, I would simply say, "I do not know what the effects of attempting democracy are."

I am not an excellent rationalist. What I do is to look hard for the answers to important questions, and then, if after long searching I cannot find the answers and I have no hope of finding the answers, but the questions still seem important, I choose an answer that appeals to my intuition.

I spent the better part of my undergraduate years trying to understand what democracy is, what violence is, and whether the two have any systematic relation to each other. Scientifically speaking, my answer is that we do not know, and will not know, in all likelihood, for quite some time. Violence happens in places where researchers find it difficult or impossible to record it; death tolls are so biased by partisans of various stripes, by the credulity of an entertainment-based media, and by the fog of war that one can almost never tell which of two similarly-sized conflicts was more violent. Democracy is, at best, a correlation among several variables, each of which can only be specified with 2 or 3 bits of meaningful information, and each of which might have different effects on violence. Given the confusion, to scientifically state a relationship between democracy and violence would be ridiculous.

And, yet, I find that I very much want to know what the relationship is between democracy and violence. I can oppose all offensive wars designed to change another country's regime type on the grounds that science supports no prediction that the certain deaths from war will be outweighed by bloodiness removed in an allegedly safer regime. What about defensive wars? I find that I cannot bring myself to say, "I would not fight to preserve my region's measure of democracy against an outside autocratic invader, because I do not know, scientifically, that such a fight would reduce total bloodiness." I would fight, believing without scientific evidence that such a war would be better than surrender.

Am I simply deluding myself? Most people on Less Wrong will think so. I do not particularly care. I am far more concerned about the danger of reasoning myself into a narcissistic, quiet-ist corner where I never take political action than I am about the danger of backing an ideal that turns out to be empty.

Using the Hansonian "far-view reference class," the odds that an ideal chosen based on "things I believe in because I was taught to believe in them" is worth killing for are near zero. Using the same method, the odds that an ideal chosen based on "things that I believe in after carefully examining all available evidence and finding that I cannot think of a good reason to overturn my culture's traditions, despite having actively questioned them" is worth killing for are high enough that I can sleep at night. If you believe I should be awake, I look forward to your reply.