As it turns out, Crick's central reflections in IDOP, warning against any sort of "ideology" or "absolute-sounding ethic", directly address one-sided policy decisions, black-and-white thinking and ingroup/outgroup bias as leading sources of epistemic bias in politics. (From this POV his work closely parallels Michael Oakeshott's cautionary essays on "Rationalism in Politics", albeit from a rather different perspective.)

Please consider writing a post about what you have learned from Crick. Please do not inject him into a wiki page that is already a loosely related reserved concept in the lesswrong namespace.

Somehow, wedfrid also objects to the "distorted" emphasis in the opening paragraph: Apparently, we don't fight over politics any more, but we used to fight over it in the ancestral environment, so our instincts are misled. But this is putting the cart before the horse: Fundamentally, politics is a means of (hopefully non-violent) conflict resolution and de-escalation, achieved through increasingly complicated strategies and institutions. When we are unable to solve a political conflict through non-violent means, we can and do fight over it, as the rulers of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen have been discovering recently. Wedfrid seems to hold to the Maoist/Machiavellian view of politics as something that "flows out of the barrel of a gun": might makes right, ethics and rights be damned. This view works correctly until it doesn't, and when it fails the costs can be severe.

I consider this to be a straw man. I did not say those things. I don't believe those things. Your claims about what I believe are not a tenable interpretation of my words.

I downvoted due to the strawman attack on wedrifid's views of politics. Bernard Crick's work sounds interesting but if it hasn't been discussed on LW it belongs on the wiki not our wiki.

With regards to your last paragraph, I would refrain from ascribing any "fundamental purpose" to politics. Things that are optimized (for example, by being designed) have purposes but politics does not seem like an obviously optimized phenomena, so saying 'fundamentally politics is X' is likely to be a mistake.