Um, how exactly do you want to preserve older things while I want to tear everything down and build it back up again? I don't want to tear things down. I want the trends that are happening - everything gets fairer and more liberal over time - to continue. To accelerate them if I can. (To design a whole new State if and only if it seems like it will make most people much happier, and even then I kinda accept that I'd need to talk to a whole lot of other people and do a whole lot of small scale experiments first.) None of those trends are making society end in fire. They're just nice things, like prejudiced views becoming less common, and violence happening less. I'm trying to optimise for making people happy; if you're optimising for something else, then I'm afraid I'm just going to have to inform you that your ethics are dumb. Sorry.

The problem with "life experience" as an argument is that people use "life experience" as a fully general counterargument. If you're older than me, any time I say something you don't like, you can just yell "LIFE EXPERIENCE!" and nothing I can do - no book you can suggest, nothing I can go observe - will allow me to win the argument. I cannot become older than you. This would be fine as an argument if we observed that older people were consistently right and younger people were consistently wrong, but as you'll know if you have a grandparent who tries to use computers, this just ain't so.

Just because you have been made jaded and cynical by your experience of the world, that doesn't mean that jaded and cynical positions are the correct ones. For one thing, most other people of your own age who also experienced the world ended up still disagreeing with you. There's a very good chance that I get to the age you are now, and still disagree with you. And if you observe most other people your own age with similar experiences (unless you're old enough that you're part of the raised-very-conservative generation) most of them will disagree with you. What is magic and special about your own specific experience that makes yours better than all those people who are the same age as you? Why should I listen to your conclusions, backed up by your "life experience", when I could also go and listen to a lefty who's the same age as you and their lefty conclusions backed up by their "life experience"?

Life experience can often make people a lot less logical. Traumatised people often hold illogical views - like, some victims of abuse are terrified of all men. That doesn't mean that, because they have life experience that I don't, I should go, 'oh, well, I actually think all men aren't evil, but I guess their life experience outweighs what I think'. It means that they've had an experience that damaged them, and we should have sympathy and try and help them, and we should even consider constructing shelters so they don't have to interact with the people they're terrified of, but we certainly shouldn't start deferring to them and adopting their beliefs just because we lack their experiences. The only things we should defer to should be logical arguments and evidence.

"Life experience", as a magical quality which you accumulate more of the more negative things happen to you, is pretty worthless. Rationalists do not believe in magical qualities.

If there is a version of the "life experience" argument that can be steelmanned, it's "I've lived a long time and have observed many things which caused me to make updates towards my beliefs, and you haven't had a chance to observe that." But that still makes no sense because you should be able to point out the things you observed to me, or show your observations on graphs, so I can observe them too. If you observed someone being a total idiot, and that makes you jaded about the possibility of a system that requires a lot of intelligence to function, then you should be able to make up for the fact that I haven't observed that idiocy by pulling out IQ charts or studies or other evidence that most people are idiots. If you can't produce evidence to convince someone else, consider that your experience may be anecdata that doesn't generalise well.

Perhaps your argument is "I've lived a long time and have observed very many very small pieces of evidence, and all of those small pieces of evidence caused me to make lots of very small updates, such that I cannot give you a single piece of evidence which you can consider which will make you update to my beliefs, but I think mine are right anyway." However, even if you can't give me a single piece of evidence that I can observe and update on, you ought to be able to produce graphs or something. Graphs are good at showing lots-of-small-bits-of-evidence-over-time stuff. If you want me to change my beliefs, you still have to produce evidence, or at least a logical argument. Appeals to "life experience" are nothing more than appeals to elder prestige.

Now, to address your actual argument. It seems to be (correct me if I misunderstand): liberal views are correct and work, but there are many stupid people in the world and liberal views don't work well for stupid people. Stupid people need clear rules that tell them in simple terms what to do and what not to do.

But if I were going to make up a set of really clear simple rules to tell a stupid person what to do and what not to do, they would be something like: 1. Be nice to people and try not to hurt people. 2. Don't try and prevent clever people from doing things you don't understand. Listen to the clever people. 3. Try and be productive and contribute what you can to society.

I cannot see any evidence that adding more rules beyond those three, like, "Defer to males because male-ness is loosely correlated with prestige-wanting and protectiveness" (even though male-ness isn't correlated with prestige-deserving, that seems about equal between genders) would do any good whatsoever. Since there are just as many stupid males as stupid females - male average IQ is actually slightly lower than female average IQ - a rule like that wouldn't do any good, would certainly not prevent people letting young kids have cigarettes or people beating one another or anything like that, and would in fact just lead to a lot of stupid people going "oh, it must be okay to hurt and disparage females and not let them have education then" and going around hurting lots of women.

And the view of mine, that liberal views don't hurt people and sexist/racist views do hurt people... certainly seems to fit the evidence. Liberal views are increasing over time, and crime and violence are decreasing over time. I can't find any studies, but I predict that if we do a study, we'll find that holding the belief "women and men are equal" is strongly correlated with being non-violent and not hurting women, and almost all of the violence and abuse cases committed against women will be by people who don't think they are equal. Similarly, doing stupid things like giving cigarettes to children and giving away products for free will be correlated with holding conservative views - though admittedly that could just be 'cause being uneducated is correlated with holding conservative views. And because men are on average more violent and more likely to hurt people. But then, that's a very good argument against putting them in charge, isn't it...?