At risk of sounding simplistic, the alternative to non-unanimous decision procedures (the realm of political society) is unanimous decision procedures (the realm of civil society).

Or living without using decision procedures at all, which is quite feasible in small groups under ~150 people. There will always be disagreement about "rights" and the like, but small groups can more easily hash out such disagreements through informal ethics (i.e. managed de-escalation of conflict). Political conflict persay only seems to arise in larger groups.

Do you think that most people would choose to define "politics" as "strongly felt affiliations with powerful groups that gain their power from our affiliation, but are too big to actually consider our preferences when using their power" ?

The purpose of tabooing words ought be to disentangle confusing connotations that the original word had. You seem to have chosen to add connotations. You may argue that politics leads to such "strongly felt affiliations" to such "powerful groups", but damn, that's a different thing from just defining politics to be such.

This pretty much implies that women aren't included in "we"

Interesting. I saw that it was doing the "treating women as plunder" thing, but it didn't occur to me that no women would be doing the stealing.

Historically raids where mostly a male thing and women where part of the expected plunder. Such things where rather common, this is why In many countries symbolical kidnapping of the bride is part of wedding celebrations.

Are you sure that's your true rejection? I think writers use “we” to denote groups that don't literally include all of the readers all the time, but from what I've seen on LW readers seem to be particularly bothered by that when that group is “males”.

but I'm not sure modulo that issue that your comment should be downvoted as much as it is

It should be. The comment fundamentally missed the point and made an irrelevant challenge to the alternative forms of competition as though it was some kind of insightful counterpoint rather than a naive trivialization.

To some extent, the point that we have politics as a way of resolving issues without bloodshed is valid: modern politics in many ways is an improvement over the alternatives. But that doesn't by itself make politics a good thing or make politics less of a mind-killer.

The point is, it's not at all clear whether we can do any better. The "politics as a way of managing conflict" POV elucidates several features that do set apart politics from ordinary deliberation, which is the domain LW-style rationality is most directly applicable to. (Such as concerns about fairness in political processes, a focus on adversarial argumentation even in factual matters, a need for compromise and creative open-mindedness in order to mitigate value conflicts etc.) For the record, I think that this - "can political discourse be improved along rationalist lines?" - is very much an open question; however, LW is most likely not the best forum for addressing it, given that such a focus would conflict with its well-defined goal of refining the art of rationality.

Thanks for the clear reply, and I agree with your points.

IMO the fact that Politics is a moderately functional substitute for direct bloodshed means that the 'rational' in any 'rational alternative' has little to do the masses becoming more rational, as opposed to careful grooming by an informed clique capable of long term planning.

That doesn't necessarily imply a shadowy cabal of super secret rationalists deftly maneuvering the public for it's own good. Rather, something as simple as spreading basic rationality skills is sufficient if we emphasize 'long term', as we should.

But that good work has to come with a working theory of capital r 'Rational Politics' or LW's knowledge base has a huge chunk missing under the 'Practical knowledge' heading, say an LWer of high karma by some twist or other became adviser to the Archduke of Wallachia, will the people be better off or not?

In other words, if despite the impressive body of knowledge created here the preferred way for dealing with politics is either: a. Outright tabooing the subject or b. Denouncing the masses as prone to being insane...

Then surely as a community can do better than that?

Admittedly I'm not that well versed in political studies myself, and I'm not calling for Eliezer or anyone else for that matter to focus on this, rather I believe the community is mature enough to have a theoretical discussion about politics -and yes, that includes discussion of parties, partisan positions etc- without devolving into mudslinging or shouting matches.

A curated area in LW with strict rules -default set to anonymous posting, no more than 5 posts per day etc- should solve most potential issues, the hullabaloo that happened during say, the feminist war is not impossible to contain.