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satt comments on Rational Repentance - Less Wrong
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Which certain political positions did you have in mind?
Well, for example, one should oppose the use of torture. Torture is Bad because it in and of itself reduces someone's utility, and because it is ineffective and even counterproductive as a means of gathering information, and so there isn't a trade off that could counteract the bad effects of torture.
The word you are looking for is 'nice', not 'rational'.
Hmm. I suspect there's a tiny little bias, possibly politically influenced, whereby signalling that you are nice implies signalling that you are irrational: naive, woolly-minded, immature, not aware of how the world really works, whatever.
But it is rational for us to oppose torture because public acceptance of torture is positively correlated with the risk of members of the public being tortured. And who wants that? It is also negatively correlated with careful, dispassionate, and effective investigation of terrorism and other crimes.
I also oppose it because I love my neighbour, an ethical heuristic I would also defend, but it's not to the point in this case.
That was assumed when I said that the person we're describing is a humanist.
I suppose then that the site that your conclusion would apply to would be humanistcommunity.org, not lesswrong. ;)
If you could convince people that it's ineffective and counterproductive, they wouldn't even need to be rationalists or even humanists in order to oppose it. So your opposition to torture (which I also oppose btw) doesn't seem like a conclusion that a rationalist is much more likely to arrive at than a non-rationalist -- it seems primarily a question of disputed facts, not misapplied logic.
There's one point that seems to me a failure of rationalism on the part of pro-torture advocates: they seem much more likely to excuse it away in the case of foreigners being tortured than in the case of their own countrymen. If the potential advantages of torture are so big, shouldn't native crimebosses and crooks also be tortured for information? This to me is evidence that racism/tribal hostility is part of the reason that they tolerate the application of torture to people of other nations.
Btw, I find "reduces someone's utility" a very VERY silly way to say "it hurts people".
Indeed, as revealed preferences show us that not torturing people reduces many people's utility. It is a stretch to say it hurts them, however.
It would be trivial for me to construct a hypothetical where torture is unambiguously a good idea. It wouldn't even be hard to make it seem a realistic situation; I might even be able to use a historical example. To call something generally irrational, or to claim that rationality is opposed to a thing, you have to make the argument that in principle it's not possible for this to be either a terminal goal or the only available instrumental goal.
I think the original claim was that political opposition to torture was rational, assuming we are talking about the use of torture by the state to investigate crimes or coerce the population, domestic or abroad. That's a less strong claim, and fairly reasonable as long as you allow for the unstated assumptions.
A much stronger claim, IMO