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ChristianKl comments on Can we dodge the mindkiller? - Less Wrong
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No, it wasn't. The question is about issues where liberals and libertarians can together engage in effective political action.
In general in US politics it's more important for politicians to impress corporate donors while in German politics it's important for politicians to impress fellow members of the same political party. Party members that go to regular party meetings. It's not like in the US where being a party member is about registering and then voting in primary elections.
Politics is inherently about the motivations of people. If you want to shield yourself from motivations then my charge of you and your DC Lawyer friends being educated about technical details of policy but not political ones is entirely accurate.
Of course you can start your blog and write a hundred blog posts about how the mortage tax deduction is crap but that won't have any meaningful political impact if you don't start taking people motivations into account and participate in motivated political discourse.
If you want to start to model political actors, it's important to model people with motivations. The idea that you can effectively model political actors without doing so, is strange to myself.
That said politicians do have some personal political views that deviate from their party line and which they don't hold because holding them is politically advantageous. In informal setting you can talk about them and why those views aren't party line.
Take the war on drugs. I know the background of the politics of how we in the city of Berlin doubled the amount of marijuana that one can carry around without being charged with a crime.
Being rational is about winning, so stop thinking of the policies that are hardest to change as low-hanging fruits.
No! That was never the question.
From the post:
I was giving more suggestions of places where a lot of LWer might find agreement. And since the major political split seems to be left vs libertarian (with a vocal minority of rightists) the natural way to start was to look at what issues liberals and libertarians end up agreeing on when they study policy issues! This explains why this entire exchange has been so odd: like you were making demands of me when all I was doing was answering a question.
Good lord... yes, I know that. But we're trying to find out what people in the Less Wrong community could cooperate on, not solve politics.
I'm not trying to model any political actor. I'm trying to model LW people as political actors. That's the point of the exercise.
Low-hanging fruit as possibilities for agreement in this community. Not low-hanging as possibilities for actually changing something. Nevertheless, "hardest to change" policies might be the policies one has most confidence in being correct and that can conceivably outweigh easier to change but more more ambiguous policies. Hard to change also often means that the issue presently has little political interest such that the marginal difference of a small number of people doing something is higher. Immigration policy (say) might be much easier to change but joining in that shouting match is not likely to make a significant difference.