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.
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.
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 mistak...
I am emotionally excited and/or deeply hurt by what st_rev wrote recently. You better take me seriously because you've spent a lot of time reading my posts already and feel invested in our common tribe. Anecdote about how people are tribal thinkers.
I don't even know where to begin. This is what blueist ideology has been workign towards for decades if not millennia, but to see it written here is hard to stomach even for one as used to the depravity caused by such delusions as I am. The lack of socially admired virtues among its adherents is frightening. Here I introduce an elaborate explanation of how blueist domination is not just completely obvious and a constant thorn in the side of all who wish more goodness but is achieved by the most questionable means often citing a particular blogger or public intellectual who I read in order to show how smart I am and because people I admire read him too. Followed by an appeal to the plot of a movie. Anecdote from my personal life. If you are familiar with the obscure work of an academic taken out of context and this does not convince you then you are clearly an intolerant sexual deviant engaging in motivated cognition.
While sympathetic to this criticism I must signal my world-weariness and sophistication by writing several long paragraphs about how this is much too optimistic and we are in grave danger of a imminent and eternal takeover by our opponents. The only solution is to begin work on an organization dedicated to preventing this which happens to give me access to material resources and attractive females.
Ciphergoth proves to be the lone voice of reason by encouraging us to recall what we all learned on 9/11: