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jsalvatier comments on Is Politics the Mindkiller? An Inconclusive Test - Less Wrong
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The other half of this is that discussing politics is goddamn useless, and I say that as someone who really enjoy's discussing and thinking about politics. Even if you were to make really fast progress in coming to sound conclusions about politics it would still be useless because almost everyone has very little political power and thus changing their minds has very little effect on the world.
People here usually value having true beliefs for their own sake. It's hard to imagine convincing someone of the efficacy of NGDP futures targeting or humanitarian military intervention is actually more useless than convincing someone of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or Bayesian epistemology. There is no shortage of Less Wrong discussions involving people trying to persuade others to hold beliefs that will have no impact on the world and I don't think that criteria is diagnostic of whether or not a discussion should take place on Less Wrong.
Hey screw you buddy!
(Ha ha, only serious.)
Perhaps I should note that I have spent many hours engaged in such conversations. It's just that the utility of the conversion isn't really relevant to the question of whether or not they're worthwhile-- I don't think the time spent on such conversations is wasted or anything like that...
Let's ban HPMOR discussion! We've wasted way more words on that than on politics.
It might be helpful to have a meta-discussion about the expected value of thinking about politics.
And then we can discuss whether having all the discussions about whether to discuss politics is really less costly than simply discussing politics :D