Politics as gymnastics for rationalists.
As something which provokes the worst impulses, I consider it good training as well.
who say people can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves
But they can be trusted to make decisions for others if they're smart? Intelligence doesn't give one knowledge or shared values.
Much of your discussion is flawed because you ignore values. Clippy may be smarter than all of us, but I'm not going to be his sheep because I don't want the universe converted to paper clips. Values matter.
At a certain point we hit diminishing returns for additional innovations
Actually, accelerated returns mean we get more bang for increased innovation each year. This year is always the worst year ever to hinder innovation.
As for giving up on Capitalism, not gonna happen. While you focus on Capitalism, many who support it are focused on a Free Market. We like the Free part, not just the mountains of stuff it helps produce.
But they can be trusted to make decisions for others if they're smart? Intelligence doesn't give one knowledge or shared values.
Fair. I think this can be solved for the "be a sheep" idea, just find someone who shares your values in addition to the other stuff. But it's trickier for the paternalists idea.
Actually, accelerated returns mean we get more bang for increased innovation each year. This year is always the worst year ever to hinder innovation.
Hmm. Economic growth historically has looked like an exponential. And traditionally it'...
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: