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?
Is that really your analysis of human society from the ground up though, or did you try to figure out how to create a rational argument for liberty?
It's not at all clear to me that if people are primarily concerned with staying alive, we should be preserving their liberty to discuss ideas freely; reasonably competent authorities passing restrictions can keep people quite safe without providing them with many liberties at all. In fact, if I really wanted to design a society optimized for keeping people alive, it would probably look rather like a prison system.
The question you should be asking yourself is not "what justifies my package of political beliefs," but "what do I think people really want out of society, and how do I optimize for that?"
Not quite from the ground up; the version that /does/ start from the ground up is summarized in http://www.datapacrat.com/sketches/Rational01ink.jpg and http://www.datapacrat.com/sketches/Rational02ink.jpg .
How about, "What do I think /I/ want out of society, and how do I opt... (read more)