I always wondered why the Less Wrong community was so "libertarian" (US-style, ie, pro-free market).
It seems at odds to me with LW views on other topics. Free market is akin to evolution : it's at optimisation process which, given enough time and space, will end up finding local maxima, but it's a blind, uncaring force that doesn't care about the sufferings it produces, that has no long-term vision. It's Azathoth. The same way that good engineering is more efficient than evolution (show me a bird flying as fast as a plane), wouldn't a good partially planned economy be better than free market ?
Or if you look at it from a CS view, especially with the SIAI view on AI (which is not shared by all Less Wrongers, but by most) : we use Azathoth-like solutions (neural network, genetic algorithms, ...) when we don't have a classical engineering solution. Shouldn't we do the same in economy ? Try to have more "engineered" solution when we can do so, and resort to the "free market" as a suboptimal but working default when we don't have an engineered solution ? If you look at EDF or SNCF (french electricity and railroads), it seems there are domains in which the "engineered solution" works well.
It would seem more coherent with the rest of the LW view to support things like Cybersyn rather than Azathoth.
Also (but my comment is already too long so I won't elaborate that one), a rational view on human psychology and cognitive biases should tell us that Homo Economicus just doesn't exist, and things like "consent" and "free will" are always a bit fuzzy, humans are prone to error and manipulation, so we should have safeguards to ensure the errors done by individual don't completely ruin their (or others) life, which argue for a strong social safety net.
I always wondered why the Less Wrong community was so "libertarian" (US-style, ie, pro-free market).
Were you aware of the LW survey results?
The most popular political view, at least according to the much-maligned categories on the survey, was liberalism, with 376 adherents and 34.5% of the vote. Libertarianism followed at 352 (32.3%), then socialism at 290 (26.6%), conservativism at 30 (2.8%) and communism at 5 (.5%).
Compare to the philpapers survey results for philosophy faculty and PhDs below. The differences are moderate, and can be exp...
Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?
I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?
Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)
I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.
Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.
The fact that this is a test, and known to be a test, means this isn't a blind study. Uh, try to act as if you're not being tested?
After it's gone on a little while, if this post hasn't been hopelessly downvoted and ridiculed (and thus the premise and test discarded as undesirable to begin with), we can put up a poll to see whether people found the political debates helpful, not helpful, and so on.