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FiftyTwo comments on That Thing That Happened - Less Wrong
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Comments (82)
[Serious comment]
This is funny and all but I worry that by mocking political signalling we miss that there are real substantive discussions to be had. Blue/Green values offs are obviously wrong, but there are empirically resolvable issues that come under the realm of "politics" and by rejecting all forms of "political" discussion we remove our ability to talk seriously about it.
E.g. Gun control (which I assume this is in reference to) is a controversial issue in the US, but the question of whether policy X is likely to be effective at producing outcome Y is an empirical one which can be made by referencing comparable past examples. This empirical question is separate from any messy political stuff about values and rights.
No it isn't. This also reveals Amerocentric assumptions.
Considering you've lost some sleep over American tribal politics before, it's not a completely unreasonable assumption.
Oh not at all. Just pointing out it is an Amerocentric one.
I'm not american, but I'm aware most of he sites users and several of the ones prominently involved in this discussion are and american politics excessively dominates media everywhere, especially online, so it seems a reasonable inference.
Right I say so elsewhere, but in this case I wasn't referring to the debate.
Except that people's attachments to values and rights, as well as the legal pragmatics surrounding them, have real-world consequences that impact the answer to that empirical question.
I tend to agree with your concern.
Discussing politics is hard because all political groups make extensive use of lies, propaganda and emotional appeals, which turns any debate into a quagmire of disputed facts and mind-killing argument. It can be tempting to dismiss the whole endeavor as hopeless and ignore it while cynically deriding those who stay involved.
Trouble is, political movements are not all equal. If they gain power, some groups will use it to make the country wealthy so they can pocket a cut of the money. Others will try to force everyone to join their religion, or destroy the economy in some wacky scheme that could never have worked, or establish an oppressive totalitarian regime and murder millions of people to secure their position. These results are not equal.
So while it might be premature to discuss actual political issues on Less Wrong, searching for techniques to make such discussions possible would be a very valuable endeavor. Political trends affect the well-being of hundreds of millions of people in substantial ways, so even a modest improvement in the quality of discourse could have a substantial payoff. At the very least, it would be nice if we could reliably identify the genocidal maniacs before they come into power...
I didn't understand this at first but now its clear. Improving the discourse on LessWrong would have an impact on actual policy. Needless to say I fully support anti-democratic coups by rationalists so lets start hoarding weapons and decide which country to start with! Due to geographic convenience and control over Silicon Valley which is vital to existential risk reduction a Protectorate of California sounds nice to me. Maybe we can outsource the boring parts of running the state to Apple.
On the slim chance however that you think a higher level of discourse on LessWrong would lead to us just pointing out the irrational side to the general public or something as silly as us voting the right way actually mattering then the value of such information is remarkably low.
Wow, look at all the straw men. Is there an actual reasoned position in there among the fashionable cynicism? If so, I can't find it.
One of the major purposes of Less Wrong is allegedly the promotion of more rational ways of thinking among as large a fraction of the general population as we can manage to reach. Finding better ways to think clearly about politics might be an especially difficult challenge, but popularizing the result of such an attempt isn't necessarily any harder than teaching people about the sunk costs fallacy.
But even if you think raising the level of public discourse is hopeless, being able to make accurate predictions of your own can also be quite valuable. Knowing things like "the Green's formula for winning elections forces them to drive any country they control into debt and financial collapse", or "the Blues hate the ethnic group I belong to, and will oppress us as much as they can get away with" can be rather important when deciding where to live and how to manage one's investments, for example.
I'm probably about to slip on a banana peel by not being ironic here, considering the fantastic positive karma scores people are racking up with irony but fools rush in and maybe I am one.
I would like to think this is true because unless we find some way to improve the level of thinking among those people who elect our governments, we will either have to live with their mistakes, or attempt to overcome them through force or secrecy and subtlety (like the nice fantasy of Asimov's 2nd foundation). If we do the latter, we will probably, like most intelligentsia who tried to do the right thing for everybody's sake, sell our souls to the devil, and end up killing each other off as the Jacobins and Bolsheviks did (It's a historical and I think thought-provoking fact that they did just that - I hope I'm not surprising too many people with this statement) . Or maybe we will take it upon ourselves to control things via super technology, thereby bringing on the Singularity before we have any idea what is required for that to be anything but a disaster.
But I fear that for most of us it seems that, "as large a fraction of the general population as we can manage to reach" is indeed a tiny minority. If that is so, I don't see how we can avoid the dilemma I mentioned above.
I'm not sure about that. Where did most of today's ideas about politics and economics, specifically the ones influencing how politics and economies are run, come from? I would argue that they're third or fourth hand versions of ideas originally developed by small circles of "intelligentsia", similar to LW, several generations ago.
This is largely true of course. We inherit our institutions from the past - some of them from professional thinkers, like scientists, or from Enlightenment philosophers by way to the generation of the 1770s and the writers of the U.S. Constitution, who they also read Seneca, Cicero, Cato the Younger, etc., and were influenced by the English thinkers who were stirred up by the struggles of the the 1600s.
I'm just detecting very little urgency. I recently attended a Meetup where the saying they viewed it as important to get Level 5 thinkers to Level 6, and saw little point (or possibility?) in trying to facilitate moving from Level 2 to Level 3.
There is at least one very broad and deep movement working to change the beliefs of the electorate in certain preconceived directions, and they have a lot to show for it. E.g.:
according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution.
When the USSR began to democratize, I think there was a missed window of opportunity and they went back to a new form of authoritarianism, from which I believe Berlusconi of Italy was able to take some lessons (i.e. from Putinism). This looked for a while like a turning back from Democracy in a nation (Italy) that had it for several decades.. During Russia's window of opportunity I think it arguable that the prevailing attitude was "Get the right ideas in the minds of the intelligentsia and that will do the job."
I expect LWers would agree that "propagandising the masses" (with ideology that we can't even agree on) is a non-starter, but I'm looking to participate with somebody in trying to broaden the idea or practice, or at least acceptance of the fruits of, a critical search for reality. One problem seems to be a breakdown common sense about who it trying to tell the truth and who is propagandising, and I fear sometimes and in too many places / situations / social circles, the U.S. is looking more like a third world country in this respect.
The posting at
is at least thought provoking along the lines that I want to be thinking in (it's not clear who wrote it), and I wonder if there is more like it somewhere (in LW or elsewhere).