Politics is the mind-killer; but rationality is the science of /winning/, even when dealing with political issues.
I've been trying to apply LessWrong and Bayesian methods to the premises and favored issues of a particular political group. (Their most basic premise is roughly equivalent to declaring that Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma programs should be 'nice'.) But, given how quickly my previous thread trying to explore this issue was downvoted into disappearing, and many of the comments I've received on similar threads, I may have a rather large blind spot preventing me from being able /to/ properly apply LW methods in this area.
So I'll try a different approach - instead of giving it a go myself again, I'll simply ask, what do /you/ think a good LW post about liberty, freedom, and fundamental human rights would look like?
Thank you for that reply - it was cogent, descriptive, and helps me figure out what I can try doing next.
(Eg, maybe something along the lines of "Man is a rational animal - he doesn't use claws or poison to survive, he uses his brain. In order /to/ use his brain most effectively, he has to be able to do certain things - most fundamentally, he has to stay alive, and in order to do that, he has to X, Y, and Z; in order to come up with new ideas to know better how to stay alive, he has to be able to discuss ideas freely; etc, etc, etc.")
I know this is tangential, but what is it with libertarians and unnecessarily gendered language? I truly don't mean that as a rhetorical question or an attack on you personally or any kind of specific political point, it's something I've been sincerely curious about before and maybe you know the answer; why do so many (obviously not all) libertarian and Randian types seem to be so attached to the whole everyone-is-"man"/"he" schema, including the ones who are way too young to have lived in times before people started realizing why that was a bad idea? Proportionally, even social conservatives don't seem to do that nearly as much anymore.