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Vaniver comments on The Mystery At The Heart of Central Banking - Less Wrong
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I should start off by mentioning I'm as big a fan of free banking as the next libertarian (perhaps more; I've even gone far enough to pick a favorite economics professor specializing in free banking).
I don't see an easy way to discuss the content of the beliefs without it being a normal political discussion, which I don't think is a good fit for LW. What seems more appropriate for LessWrong is the process that they use to reach those beliefs- but I don't think there's anything interesting going on besides normal political / self-serving close-mindedness. From my point of view, whether or not banking is centralized is an obviously political question about where power is stored, and progressives want the power centralized, and mainstream academic economics is progressive economics, so they recommend the power be centralized, and this looks like run of the mill motivated cognition.
For calibration: do you think the question of whether green house gas emissions cause climate change is a political question?
Edit: to clarify this question is directed to the writer the post I'm responding to and is not meant to solicit responses from all readers. It's a post rather than a PM because I think the answer impacts the interpretation of the above post.
I think discussions of it here would probably be, yes. I suspect it would be possible to have a discussion that wasn't, but it would be much easier to do about some narrow subquestion, which would probably not be easy to identify.
The primary reason why I suspect that is I think most people don't have the relevant backgrounds to comment on it, and the people who do have relevant backgrounds will have relevant backgrounds about different parts. The impression I get is that people who know a lot about simulations and dynamical systems (like myself) think that climate change modeling is mostly worthless on a technical level (i.e. by different choices of fudge factors they could get about any result they wanted from their models, and the current results are what seems reasonable to the culture of climate scientists), but I don't know enough about climate science to know how significant a role the models play in their whole argument.
I'll also point out that the primary discussion of a scientific subject (other than cognitive or decision science) here that comes to mind- the QM sequence- was, if I recall correctly, explicitly a question that is political in some parts of the world.