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Constant comments on What I've learned from Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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cousin_it:
Trouble is, the question still remains open: how to understand politics so that you're reasonably sure that you've grasped its implications on your personal life and destiny well enough? Too often, LW participants seem to me like they take it for granted that throughout the Western world, something resembling the modern U.S. regime will continue into indefinite future, all until a technological singularity kicks in. But this seems to me like a completely unwarranted assumption, and if it turns out to be false, then the ability to understand where the present political system is heading and plan for the consequences will be a highly valuable intellectual asset -- something that a self-proclaimed "rationalist" should definitely take into account.
Now, for full disclosure, there are many reasons why I could be biased about this. I lived through a time and place -- late 1980s and early 1990s in ex-Yugoslavia -- where most people were blissfully unaware of the storm that was just beyond the horizon, even though any cool-headed objective observer should have been able to foresee it. My own life was very negatively affected by my family's inability to understand the situation before all hell broke loose. This has perhaps made me so paranoid that I'm unable to understand why the present political situation in the Western world is guaranteed to be so stable that I can safely forget about it. Yet I still have to see some arguments for this conclusion that would pass the standards that LW people normally apply to other topics.
With emphasis on "could be" as opposed to "am". Different past experiences leading to different conclusions isn't necessarily "bias". This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I often see the naive, the inexperienced, quite often the young, dismiss the views of the more experienced as "biased" or by some broad synonym.
The implicit reasoning seems to be as follows: "Here is the evidence. The evidence plus a uniform prior distribution leads to conclusion A. Yet this person sees the evidence and draws conclusion B different from A. Therefore he is letting his biases affect his judgment."
One problem with the reasoning is that "the evidence" is not the (only) evidence. There is, rather, "evidence I'm aware of" and "evidence I'm not aware of but the other person might be aware of". It's entirely possible for that other evidence to be decisive.