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ChristianKl comments on Harper's Magazine article on LW/MIRI/CFAR and Ethereum - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
His main classification of LW wasn't libertarian but post-political. On a website that uses the slogan "politics is the mindkiller" I think post-political is a fair label.
The article is not only about LW but also about people like Peter Thiel who are clearly libertarian and the crypto-currency folks who are also libertarian.
Most of those people who answer liberal or socialist on the LW survey don't do anything political that matters. Thiel on the other hand is global player who matters.
The core summary of LW's politics in the article might be Vassar quote:
I think most those people who do label as liberal or socialist on LW would agree with that sentiment. Getting politcs right is not about being left, right or liberatarian but about actually thinking rationally about the underlying issues. That's post-political from the perspective of the author.
That's in the CFAR mission statement:
I think the author was right to present that idea as the main political philosophy of LW instead of just pattern matching to the standard labels.
If you want to be perceived as a liberal or socialist community than you would need people who not only self-label themselves that way on surveys but who also do something under those labels that's interesting to the outside world.
It's also, strictly speaking, incorrect. A set of propositions must have some very specific properties in order to be made into a probability distribution:
1) The propositions must be mutually exclusive.
2) Each proposition must be true in some nonzero fraction of possible worlds/samples.
3) In any given possible world/sample, only one proposition can be true.
(This is assuming we're talking about atomic events rather than compound events.) So for example, when rolling a normal, 6-sided die, we can only get one number, and we also must get one number. No more, no less.
Political positions often fail to be mutually exclusive (in implementation if not in ideal), and the political reasoning we engage in on most issues always fails to exhaust the entire available space of possible positions.
This means that when it comes to these issues, we can't just assign a prior and update on evidence until we have evidence sufficient to swamp the prior and we declare ourselves to arrive to a "rational" conclusion. The relevant propositions simply don't obey the axioms of probability like that. Outside Context Problems can and do occur, and sometimes Outside Context Solutions are the right ones, but we didn't think of them because we were busy shuffling belief-mass around a tiny, over-constrained corner of the solution space.
I'm not sure how what you relate to what I wrote.
Plenty of policy ideas on LW are outside of the standard context of left vs. right. I don't think that this community is reasonably criticised for for thinking enough about outside context solutions.
Sorry, I didn't mean that "LW is outside standard left vs right." I meant that "post-political" politics is categorically impossible when you can't exhaustively evaluate Solomonoff Induction. You cannot reduce an entire politics to "I rationally evaluated the evidence and updated my hypotheses", because the relevant set of propositions doesn't fit the necessary axioms. Instead, I think we have to address politics as a heuristic, limited-information, online-learning utility-maximization inference problem, one that also includes the constraint of trying to make sure malign, naively selfish, ignorant, and idiotic agents can't mess up the strategy we're trying to play while knowing that other agents view us as belonging to all those listed categories of Bad People.
So it's not just an inference problem with very limited data, it's an inference about inference problem with very limited data. You can't reduce it to some computationally simpler problem of updating a posterior distribution, you can only gather data, induce improved heuristics, and hope to God you're not in a local maximum.
I think rationality in the LW sense can to be said to be about heuristics, limited-information and an online-learning utility-maximization inference problem.
If you say that on LW. People are generally going to agree and maybe add a few qualifiers. If someone on Huffington post would say: "We should think about politics as being heuristics, limited-information and an online-learning utility-maximization inference problem.", the audience wouldn't know what you are talking about.
That assumes that the best way to act is in a way where other agents get a sense that you are playing or what you are playing.
There no reason to believe that a problem being visible makes it important. Under the Obama adminiratrion the EPA managed to raise standards on mercury pollution by being able to calculate that the IQ points of American children are worth more than the money it costs to reduce polution. The issue didn't become major headlines because nobody really cared about making it a controversial issue. Nobody had the stomach to hold a speech about how the EPA should value the IQ of American kids less.
At the same time the EPA didn't get anything done on the topic of global warming that was in the news.
Naomi Klein description about how white men in Africa kept economic equality when the gave blacks "equal rights" is a good example of how knowledge allows acting in a way that makes it irrelevant that the whites where seen as Bad People.
Playing 1 or 2 levels higher can do a lot.