My opinions are too abstract. If I tried to apply them to derive concrete policy proposals the is-ought problem is returned.
I have opinions about the role the relative costs of attack and defense have played in civilization. I have opinions about how financial innovation has affected war. I have opinions about contract law. I have opinions about demographic transitions. Do these opinions make me a democrat or republican? Um.
As for politics affecting my life? My life is affected by the possibility of natural disaster, but I don't get angry at earthquakes. You buy yourself an earthquake kit and try to live your life. How much you spend on the earthquake kit is based on your updates of their probability. For that you survey expert opinion every now and then. If a bunch of volcano experts with good prediction records tell you that your house will be covered in lava next week you pack up and move. If you told me that you were angry at the lava because you believed it maliciously destroyed your house I'd think you were a little dumb, but in a very usual way for humans; I wouldn't hold it against you.
I tried to rewrite this a few times to avoid looking like I'm trying to signal sophistication and aloofness but I did not entirely succeed. I don't regard weirdness as cool for the record. If I need to avoid signaling weirdness I will dance around some sort of toned down libertarianism that is fairly equally innocuous to most sorts of people.
My life is affected by the possibility of natural disaster, but I don't get angry at earthquakes.
Getting angry at earthquakes doesn't affect their behavior, getting angry at people does.
I've long opposed discussing politics on Less Wrong. Elsewhere, however, I have been known to gaze into the abyss; and so it came to be that I wrote a handful of blog posts of the Oxford Libertarian Society Blog. I had the deliberate intention of bring a little bit of rationality into politics - and so of course ended up writing in something like Eliezer's style.
I wanted to establish some theory first, so the initial posts were about The Conservation of Expected Evidence and Reductionism, and then one particular Death-Spiral.
As you'll probably notice, one of my defences against the little-death has been to err on the side of attacking Libertarian positions; I provided an account of Traditional Socialist Values so we remember that our enemies aren't inherently evil, and then analysed an abuse of The Law of Comparative Advantage, showing cases where it didn't apply.
I can't promise I'll update at all regularly.
Post inspired by Will Newsome and prompted by Vladimir Nesov.
http://oxlib.blogspot.com/