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.

Thanks for your suggestion. At this point, I'm willing to leave this as an exercise to the interested reader, since politics-in-the-abstract is not actually a very significant topic here, at least at present.

It would be rather more useful to discuss Crick's and others' views in the context of designing actual tools to support rationality in deliberation, negotiation, bargaining and other features of policy decision making. This is very much an open problem, one which--if solved--would seem to have remarkable potential in raising the sanity waterline.

Yes, much of politics is not about policy, but instead is driven by hidden motives such as signaling, negotiating status among groups and so on: improving policy deliberation won't make political behavior fully optimal. Nonetheless, such motives also apply to academic research and scholarship, charity, business and other enterprises which yield useful products and can make good use of deliberation tools for their private and internal decision making.

Robin Hanson has taken a first stab at this problem with his futarchy and decision market, but--needless to say--his solution is rather extreme and not very close to the actual Western ideal of political deliberation. The inferential distance here may simply be too large for comfort.