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nyan_sandwich comments on Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Reposting a comment I made on Yvain's livejournal:
There's a standard argument about "efficient charity" that says you should concentrate all your donations on one charity, because presumably you have preferences over the total amounts of money donated to each charity (not just your own donations), so choosing something like a 50/50 split would be too sensitive to other people's donations.
I just realized that the argument applies in equal force to politics. If you're not using "beliefs as attire" but actually care about politics, your participation in politics should be 100% extremist. That's troubling.
You might be an extreme centrist. Or an extreme pragmatic. Not all extremists are the "take some idea to its (il)logical conclusion and start blowing things up" type.
I believe the point is that while your personal beliefs may lie at any point in some high-dimensional space, if you're getting involved in politics in some anonymous way you should throw all your support behind the single "best" group, even if, like in two-party politics, that means supporting a group you have significant differences with. Non-anonymity (nonymity) changes things, leading to behavior like lobbying multiple parties.
I don't really find it that disturbing, but it does get a little weird when you remember how bad humans are at separating acts from mental states.