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kilobug comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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I don't agree nor like this singling-out of politics as the only thing in which people don't update. People fail to update in many fields, they'll fail to update in love, in religion, in drug risks, in ... there is almost no domain of life in which people don't fail to update at times, rationalizing instead of updating.
In addition to what pleeppleep said, I think there is a bit of illusion of transparency here.
As I've said elsewhere, what Eliezer clearly intends with the label "political" is not partisan electioneering to decide whether the community organizer or the business executive is the next President of the United States. Instead, he means something closer to what Paul Graham means when he talks about keeping one's identity small.
Among humans at least, "Personal identity is the mindkiller."
This is evidently confusing readers, since over here someone thought it was about "social manipulation, status, and signaling".
I must confess that I don't seem any substantial disagreement between my articulation of EY's views and pleeppleep's articulation.
There are certain kinds of inter-personal conflicts that effect a person's mental processes such that the person does not update on the evidence the way rationality says they should. These inter-personal conflicts can profitably labelled with the word "politics." But these inter-personal conflicts include more than those I've labeled "partisan electioneering."
Whether "status-challenge" or "threat-to-personal-identity" is the more accurate description of the causal factors leading to this phenomena is not particularly important to understanding what EY meant when he said "Politics is the mindkiller."
Still, there may be a better word than “politics” for him to use.
He didn't say "politics" was special. He seemed to be pointing out that updating is called for in circumstances other than the example. "Politics" is used to represent all other issues, and it was relevant because a common criticism of truth is that it is an illusion used to gain a political advantage.