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SoullessAutomaton comments on Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Two things surprise me.
First while 73.4% of responders are consequentialists and only 9% deontologists, at the same time 45% of responders are libertarians. While labels like that are vague, libertarianism is in most versions highly deontologist ideology, and cares about processes and not results as such.
The other thing was 33.3% of "single and looking" (plus 24.2% of "single and not looking" consists of some mix of "single and not interested" and "single, tried but given up"). There are some well known seduction techniques based on adjusting for biases people have because we're evolutionarily adapted to a different environment. I'd guess most responders compartmentalize their rationality and do not apply rational thinking to their personal lifes. More compartment-busting posts please?
Echoing RichardKennaway, IMO most of the strong arguments for libertarianism (as a set of policies) are consequentialist ones by economists.
The other issue is how to classify someone if they defend some mix of consequentialism and deontology. For example, Robert Nozick argued for rights as side constraints in an otherwise utilitarian moral theory, and Roderick Long argues for deontology based on consequentialist grounds. I'll raise my hand as someone who could probably truthfully describe myself as either, but settled on consequentialist in part for social reasons.
Do any of these economists have a consistently successful track record of prediction? Remember, this is a field where opinions of serious economists on the recent stimulus package ranged from "it won't have any effect" to "it will make things worse" to "it doesn't go far enough".
Economists talking about large-scale political structures should be assumed to lack credibility until proven otherwise via actual, consistent predictive results.
EDIT: Requesting clarification on why this comment was voted down to -2. Robin has posted repeatedly on many experts' allergies to predictions. Have I made a mistake in my conclusions here?
lesswrong is not completely there yet, but it's steadily heading toward reddit's "downvote to disagree". It's a natural consequence of reddit-style comment up/down-voting system, don't think about it too much.
Strongly disagree about "don't think about it too much," but upvoted for pointing out this important problem. Everyone: upvote for useful discourse, not agreement!
Unless or until we get separate voting for "agreement" vs. "quality", as people have mentioned a few times.
"don't think about it too much" as in "don't think about things you cannot affect". Unless you want to go and convince Eliezer to remove downvoting and leave only upvote and report links like on Hacker News.
This will leave more garbage in the comments of course, I think it's smaller problem than "downvote to disagree", but I have no strong evidence about it.
Listen to Robin Hanson discuss this phenomenon on EconTalk. Starts with half-hour monologue by presenter, but I find the presenter quite interesting too.