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Johnicholas comments on Dead Aid - Less Wrong
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Comments (17)
This is politics; off-topic for LessWrong.
Are we allowed to talk about meta-politics? For example, techniques that would theoretically help someone vote better?
I'd certainly say yes.
politics is an applied topic in rationality, as is economics and maximizing your return on (selfish or altruistic) investment, both also topics of this post. As long as a the discussion doesn't degenerate into a blue vs. green fight, I see no problem with it. Does anybody else?
I don't think it's wise to censor a post from LW just because it contains some politics. However, I'm not sure I see any content in this post related to rationality.
To me, the post is basically saying "Someone wrote a book. Here's a summary of what they wrote." My response: Okay, so what?
That said, I did find this post useful in my "rationality-training", because when I read it, my first instinct was to think "Aha, so I was right not to send my money to Africa", but then recovered from this by noting that I was falling into Yvain's trap of covering up the real reason I did not want to donate (i.e. that I am selfish).
Every aspect of human activity is an applied topic in instrumental rationality. Unless the discussion is explicitly concerned with the feedback from the specific applications to the much more general techniques, it must be considered off-topic, otherwise the discussion will deteriorate into "general talk", even if of highly rational variety.
I posted it because it was so relevant to the debate held last week in the "So you say you're an altruist" thread.
It might have been more on-topic for Overcoming Bias than Less Wrong, but I'm voting up because this is a data point in a topic that's frequently come up in both places: What are the real costs of "purchase of moral satisfaction" or feeling better about trying than succeeding?
Of course, this is one of my own favorite topics and I suppose I will bow to the will of the community if they think this constitutes "just politics".
Isn't politics one of the things that it's important to become less wrong about?
Yes, the expected value of political discussions is low because people's rationality is so easily overwhelmed on this topic, but we should still give it a try once in a while. Perhaps we'll surprise ourselves with our maturity and wisdom.
I would have found this post more useful if it would have included at least some sort of analysis of the biases involved in such mistaken aid. Wouldn't have needed to be anything extensive - the analysis in my posts isn't all that extensive, but I strive to always have at least something that makes it relate to rationality directly.
This is not about politics. It's about rationality, complex systems, and counter-intuitive results.