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?
I suspect that it is due to emotional reactions against feeling like one is being told what to do. I don't know what the correlation v. causation is in what comes first (the philosophical attitude leading to such emotional reactions or the emotional attitude making one more likely to accept a libertarian philosophical viewpoint). But given such an emotional reaction, one can easily see people going out of their way to avoid using the terminology that they might feel like they are being told to use.