lukeprog comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 06:16PM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 02 October 2012 11:13:28PM 2 points [-]

what Eliezer clearly intends with the label "political" is [...] something closer to what Paul Graham means when he talks about keeping one's identity small.

This is evidently confusing readers, since over here someone thought it was about "social manipulation, status, and signaling".

Comment author: TimS 03 October 2012 02:18:26AM *  0 points [-]

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."