You seem to be asserting that people in general care less about politics than they should.

There are several very perverse incentives driving people's actions. Individually, in a fairly rational community, I don't know "what people think," nor do I make much of a claim to know, although my baseline predictions might be more accurate than the average person's simply because I've spent so much time speaking to the general public about politics. My main point is that: Insufficient caring about limits on government power results in death and suffering on a large scale.

I would challenge that assertion; it seems unlikely on the face of it.

And this strikes me as plain willful ignorance. How can you look at the old film reels of nazi destruction and democide and say "That's not important?" Yet, you do, and so does everyone else. Or, they say "That's important, but we've got it figured out, so we don't need to worry about it." (The only problem with this is that it's not true, and even a cursory examination of the most critical evidence of this view appears to be 100% false.)

There are many problems with this statement, but it does get to the heart of the problem, so I thank you for it. It seems to me that perverse social pressures against the kind of education that reduces tyranny are at work in the USA, and every culture. We have not maintained our natural, incrementally won, defenses against "tyranny." Now, tyranny encompasses a large territory, so let me give you a shorthand definition of that suitcase word that will serve this conversation. Tyranny can be defined for our purposes as a state of affairs that leads to or causes democide, or relative impoverishment and suffering resulting in millions of unnecessary deaths. Basically, from a libertarian perspective, tyranny is the grossly sub-optimal universal application of the initiation of force.

As noted in OP, we had much more impact on politics (and its close neighbor, tribal signalling) in the ancestral environment than we do now, and it was much more directly a matter of life-and-death.

Actually, it's equally a matter of life-and-death now, but your education level on that topic is too low to sense the threat. Which, of course, makes it much more of a threat to you. And, of course, technology has offset the suffering level, as an independent variable, so you're much more comfortable up to the looting of your estate, your life's amassed value, and your state-imposed death than you would have been under a more crude and less technologically able oligarchy of a few years ago. The sociopaths who govern us have gotten very good at allowing their livestock minimal levels of comfort. Of course, when you measure the freedom we have, it's almost all gone. ...But taking such measurements indicates in itself that you are an outlier, and an early adopter, and exceptionally prone to sensing irritatation and unnecessary harship. It also requires a high level of intellectual honesty: a quality most people totally lack.

Thus, we are hard-wired to care about politics to a greater extent than we should.

Politics is a really crude suitcase word, and your use of it here, and my uncritical response to your use of it is not really appropriate to a meaningful conversation of the values at work. We've both been stripped of our vocabulary, an economic or incentive-based vocabulary, for dealing with politics. This is to the immense benefit of bureaucrats who depend on votes for their income, such as teachers and professors. The separation of performance from reward is "political" in nature. If we define "politics" as "the domain of life currently governed by force," thats probably as accurate a definition as possible.

You're new here, and so you're not used to our community norms - in those cases, we try to cut people some slack. But it really seems to me that you're not ready to be making contributions;

Well, you might be wrong. I've met a lot of very wrong people in my existence. Systemwide, wrong people contribute overwhelmingly to the loss of limits on government. Our system is (mostly) one of sociopaths elected by conformists. Many of those conformists are incredibly intelligent, but not rational in their assessment of the threat of tyranny. (Again, tyranny, like almost all political words, is a suitcase word that contains a lot of other words. However, I'm trying to keep the phrasing from being really boring and pedantic, and perhaps the last time you were pulled over by a cop, with no constitutional legal cause of action, you felt tyrannized. My goal is to agitate toward rational behavior that will produce the desired outcome of avoiding a severe, but difficult to recognize, danger.)

My newness to this forum might be caused by a lack of prior comprehension or involvement, or it might not be. Newness combined with controversy tends to result in any portion of the entrenched system responding to discomfort, and trying to eject the new and uncomfortable change. And, partly, I have a limited amount of skill, and a slow typing speed, and some percentage is my fault, for not communicating adequately. As Kurzweil has said, my language is "slow, serial, and imprecise." ...Vastly inferior to a megahertz machine scan of my logical positions and arguments.

try to restrict yourself to asking questions that might further your understanding of rationality.

I will if you will. This statement assumes I don't have much to contribute, and I clearly don't see it that way, even given my "rough edges."

You appear to be incapable of seeing that your enemies are not evil aliens - you describe communists as 'idiots', as though there is no way an intelligent, well-meaning person could believe that communism is a good system of governance*.

Now that the data is in, there isn't. Such people place a low value on human life, and economic comprehension. They don't care to truthfully examine emergent order, because they are emotionally invested in collectivism, because it's a part of their identity.

The people shoving Jews into gas chambers weren't "evil aliens" either. One of them was an industrialist, highly educated weaver, Franz Stangl. He said it made his knees weak to shove women and kids into the ovens. ...But he did it. Just because I'm dealing with extreme values, people are going to react in an irrational way to the objective information I'm delivering. Few people have the intellectual honesty to think about democide dispassionately. ...Which is why it's such a huge danger.

I refer you, again, to R. J. Rummel's work on the subject. The Democratic Peace and Democracy Defined

I shall refer you to this chestnut from G.K.Chesterton:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

Which is why there must be an underlying comprehension of the fundamental principles at work. I have such a deep underlying comprehension. Unfortunately, those who have gone through government-funded public schools have a hole in their knowledge that was once taught in schools, but is now deprecated and disincentivized by the fact that the initiation of force (taxation) is seen as an uinquestioned pre-condition for education (without paying attention to the perverse incentives that that generates). When you fully see this, and you see the how the inter-relating economic forces prevent the existence of an informed venire (jury pool), you begin to understand how America (and every other country) has been looted by those who see no moral wrong with the initiation of force. The problem isn't that I'm unable to see the function of something, it's that I see it fully, and I also see how most of those who surround me are invested in a functionality that, when fully examined, is horribly immoral.

This is one of the objectively most wrong comments that's ever been written. A hell of a lot of people went to gas chambers, gulags, and death camps believing this sort of pure, undiluted bullshit (of the highly-dangerous-to-continuing-health variety). Just think about it. You wrote:

So it is with opposing viewpoints. Policy debates should not appear one-sided. If you do not understand how an intelligent, well-meaning person can have a position, and it's a position that lots of people actually hold, then you do not understand the position yet.

So, if you were defending Jews in 1930s Germany, by this "reasoning," you'd be wrong. If you were defending runaway slaves in 1850s America, same thing. If you are defending American prisoners in today's America, same thing.

Even a semi-literate reading of History shows us that the consensus is very often wrong, for reasons exposed scientifically by Milgram's famous "false electroshock" or "obedience to authority" experiment(s). To find out more about why and how the consensus has been wrong, you need to learn the first thing about the Enlightenment, and how it was different from the even more wrong medieval time periods. (For example, religion isn't a good source of authority, and resulted in over 800 years of "trial by ordeal" in England, among creatures whose neocortices were at least as developed as our own.)

...Unless the point you're making is that we've reached the pinnacle of democratic organization in our society. That's a claim I'd be happy to debate, seeing as to how in the North in 1850 there was no "voir dire" but there was such a thing in 1851, (and still is) and the Fugitive Slave Law was unenforceable for the first part of 1851, and became enforceable after voir dire was instated. Voir dire is still what has allowed prosecutors to enforce the laws that libertarians (such as Eliezer Yudkowsky) see as illegitimate, to this day. (He may or may not know that, but that's in fact the mechanism.)

If you do not understand how an intelligent, well-meaning person can have a position, and it's a position that lots of people actually hold, then you do not understand the position yet.

Unless "I think the intelligent, well-meaning person is making an error due to cognitive bias, ignorance, or being lied to" counts as understanding them, I do not understand how an intelligent, well-meaning, person can believe in

-- homeopathy

-- The US political version of intelligent design

-- 9/11 conspiracy theories

These are positions that lots of people actually hold. Do I fail to understand these positions?

Would you consider writing a discussion post on it?

Just in case the uncle comment by thomblake hasn't driven home the point, please don't do this.

x

There's a chapter in Bostrom's Existential Risks by Caplan on the subject.