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.

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.

.It sounds like you've thought a lot about this topic.

Thanks for saying so.

Would you consider writing a discussion post on it ? You could call it something like "Politics as an existential risk". As far as I understand, most people here believe that politics is basically not worth talking about; you obviously disagree, so your post should provoke some interesting discussion.

That was the first thing I wrote here. I actually gave it a similar title. Perhaps you're a moderator and have seen it, and are trying to be nice to me. If so, thanks.

I tried hard, included a lot of links, and then hit "post," but I lacked the karma to post it. Too few pant-hooting rationalist chimps had upvoted me for being an incremental and timid contributor. (This isn't a problem with democracy, it's a problem with poorly-designed democracy, with bad electoral rules.) So, LW loses the information, lose any possible value my post may have contributed, due to poor functionality.

Soon, I'll have tired with attempting to post here. I'm already growing impatient, as the system is designed to make me (and similar minds). I just bought a domain name where I can promote a rational solution to the problem of too little individual freedom. When I can afford to include a forum there, I promise to design it with more "conversation-stimulating" (more rational?) thresholds.

I might proceed into the future far enough to do some good with it. More likely, the system's response to my (and a small group of other similarly-informed and similarly inclined people's) efforts will prevail. It's a strong strategic solution, we've already identified it. It's the passage of the NDAA.

When jury rights activist Frank Turney in Fairbanks Alaska succeeded in getting a victimless crime case (gun possession) nullified by a jury, he was charged with "jury tampering" under an Alaska law that directly violates the first amendment. He was found guilty by a unconstitutionally rigged jury, and sentenced to prison, for telling jurors about the rights that they possessed under the law. When he was released, he continued doing what he was just sent to prison for, and the state of Alaska has so far been too cowardly to arrest him again, given the growing public sympathy with what he's doing (and their growing dissatisfaction with existing "political solutions"). The state needed a stronger punishment, that allowed no possibility of constitutional redress, or expanding public awareness and sympathy. The NDAA is their solution, and it's perfect. Now, if Frank continues to speak in public, they can fly him to GITMO, and torture him to death in isolation, and you never need to find out about it. If they were to implement the solution now, a few people would object. But the solution is now signed into law, and it remains their "trump card." As the system decays, the trump card will be played.

When I see what we're up against, it seems that the NDAA is a great means of the system preserving itself. The people who embrace my systemic solution can now be carted off to the gulag, without jury trial. Such a "solution" to the determined push for rational, enlightenment values never existed before. (Stephen Omohundro spoke about constitutions, and systemic self-correction in his 2007 Q&A before the Sing Inst crowd, so I'm not alone in seeing these solutions. ...But very few people are as aware as perhaps Stephen, Frank Turney, and myself are. And, of those people, a smaller subset are willing to risk life and limb to pursue systemic "equality under the law" or "market predictablility." This doesn't mean that production will stop, or that we'll all be impoverished. It does mean production will be cartelized, and there will be no freedom, and that the system will progressively deteriorate.)

Unfortunately, if I'm right about this, when my response is really getting off the ground, I'll disappear for good. My soviet acquaintances had stories about what that was like, and I'm not looking forward to it. When you take into account that this is what curiousity about tyranny is rewarded with, the (locally rational, systemically cowardly) survival mechanism that protects and favors ignorance makes a lot of sense. ...Except that it yields to a dramatic, system wide loss for all intelligent, rational, and moral people playing the game.

In such a system, virtually all such rational, intelligent, and moral people play the role of Giordano Bruno. (Except people like Doug Casey, who leave the country as they identify the more severe warning signs along the rhyming timeline of tyranny. See: Conversations With Casey )

Again: a proper understanding of politics is the mind-expander, not a mind-killer. But improper understandings of politics are indeed not only a mind-killer, but a body-killer as well. As one footstep in the right direction, I suggest this essay, that will help to shed light on the problem and the solution: A History of Jury Nullification

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