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SarahC comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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Hang on. Instrumental rationality.
If you want to make political impact, don't have discussions about politics on blogs; go do something that makes the best use of your skills. Start an organization, work on a campaign, make political issues your profession or a major personal project.
If that doesn't sound appealing (to me, it doesn't, but people I admire often do throw themselves into political work) then talking politics is just shooting the shit. Even if you're very serious and rational about it, it's pretty much recreation.
I used to really like politics as recreation -- it made me feel good -- but it has its downsides. One, it can take up a lot of time that you could use to build skills, get work done, or have more intense fun (a night out on the town vs. a night in on the internet.) Two, it can make you dislike people that you'd otherwise like; it screws with personal relationships. Three, there's something that bothers me morally, a little, about using issues that are serious life-and-death problems for other people as my form of recreation. Four, in some cases, including mine, politics can hurt your personal development in a particular way: I would palliate my sense of not being a good person by reassuring myself that I had the right opinions. Now I'm trying to actually be a better person in practice, and also trying to worry less about imaginary sins; it's work in progress, of course, but I feel I don't need my "fix" of righteous anger as much.
This is a personal experience, of course, but I think that it's worth it for everyone to ask, "Why do I talk politics? Do I want to talk politics?"
"If you want to make political impact, don't have discussions about politics on blogs; go do something that makes the best use of your skills. Start an organization, work on a campaign, make political issues your profession or a major personal project."
You omit the most important step, which comes before starting an organization. That's figuring out what politics this organization should espouse and how it should espouse those politics.
If my views are almost diametrically opposed to Robin Hanson's, and I have no good reason to think I'm more rational than Robin or otherwise in a better epistemic position, I'm not rationally justified in setting up an organization to espouse my views because I should consider, in that event, that my views have at least a .5 chance of being wrong, probably much higher. The worst think people can do is set up political projects based on ill-considered principles to end up advocating the wrong policies. As long as rational, informed people disagree, one isn't entitled to a strongly held political position.
What you said might make sense if political debate were strictly about means and there was general agreement on ends. But it is not. And your views on the ends of policy are worth every bit as much as Dr. Hanson's, however much you worry that his thinking might be better than yours concerning means.