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cousin_it 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.
Your comment is an instance of the "forcing fallacy" which really deserves a post of its own: claiming that we should spend resources on a problem because a lot of utility depends, or could depend, on the answer. There are many examples of this on LW, but to choose an uncontroversial one from elsewhere: why aren't more physicists working on teleportation? The general counter to the pattern is noting that problems may be difficult, and may or may not have viable attacks right now, so we may be better off ignoring them after all. I don't see a viable attack for applying LW-style rationality to political prediction, do you?
This is valid where there are experts that can confidently estimate that there are no attacks. There are lots of expert physicists, so if steps towards teleportation were feasible, someone would've noticed. In case there are no experts to produce such confidence, correct course of action is to create them (perhaps from more general experts, by way of giving a research focus).
The rule "If it's an important problem, and we haven't tried to understand it, we should" holds in any case, it's just that in case of teleportation, we already did try to understand what we presently can, as a side effect of widespread knowledge of physics.