It seems to me that many political arguments are not about values
Political conflict comes from conflicts over facts and values. Facts are relatively easy to establish. Values simply conflict.
people both for and against nuclear power will typically argue that their way of doing things will be better for the environment.
Where "better" drops the context of "better according to my values", so that better to me is not better to you. Better is a value judgment, and our values are not identical.
People are hopeless to talk politics with until they grok this.
The first thing to do in any honest negotiation is to mutually communicate your values.
Elsewhere in this thread you say that politics brings out the worst in you rationality-wise.
People tend to think poorly when something is on the line, in conflict with what others have on the line. But there is a conceptual difficulty prior to that, where they mistake their preferences for facts of the universe, equally applicable to all.
It's difficult to be rational when you're in conflict with others about significant values. It's next to impossible if your fundamental concepts structurally commit you to error about the reality of the conflict.
Facts are relatively easy to establish.
Tell that to a scientist (one who establishes facts as a profession).
Where "better" drops the context of "better according to my values", so that better to me is not better to you. Better is a value judgment, and our values are not identical.
I disagree this is the case for folks who argue about nuclear power.
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: