What would a good article on Bayesian liberty look like?

DataPacRat

Politics is the mind-killer; but rationality is the science of /winning/, even when dealing with political issues.

I've been trying to apply LessWrong and Bayesian methods to the premises and favored issues of a particular political group. (Their most basic premise is roughly equivalent to declaring that Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma programs should be 'nice'.) But, given how quickly my previous thread trying to explore this issue was downvoted into disappearing, and many of the comments I've received on similar threads, I may have a rather large blind spot preventing me from being able /to/ properly apply LW methods in this area.

So I'll try a different approach - instead of giving it a go myself again, I'll simply ask, what do /you/ think a good LW post about liberty, freedom, and fundamental human rights would look like?

Politics is the mind-killer; but rationality is the science of /winning/, even when dealing with political issues.

So I'll try a different approach - instead of giving it a go myself again, I'll simply ask, what do /you/ think a good LW post about liberty, freedom, and fundamental human rights would look like?

I know this is tangential, but what is it with libertarians and unnecessarily gendered language? I truly don't mean that as a rhetorical question or an attack on you personally or any kind of specific political point, it's something I've been sincerely curious about before and maybe you know the answer; why do so many (obviously not all) libertarian and Randian types seem to be so attached to the whole everyone-is-"man"/"he" schema, including the ones who are way too young to have lived in times before people started realizing why that was a bad idea? Proportionally, even social conservatives don't seem to do that nearly as much anymore.

"Use gender-neutral language" is motivated by an egalitarian instinct, and is said by (moral) authorities - both are things libertarians don't seem very fond of.

(I don't identify very strongly as a libertarian, but can relate to the kneejerk reflex against being told what to do)

Also, some people might not phrase it as "people started realizing why that was a bad idea" but rather as "sanctimonious politically correct busybodies started telling everybody how to speak resulting in some horrible eyesores like he/she or ey all over the ... (read more)

0[anonymous]15y

I'd guess it's the gender split. It's a doozy. I think you'd see less gendered in libertarian journalism, where there are more women.

3JoshuaZ15y

I suspect that it is due to emotional reactions against feeling like one is being told what to do. I don't know what the correlation v. causation is in what comes first (the philosophical attitude leading to such emotional reactions or the emotional attitude making one more likely to accept a libertarian philosophical viewpoint). But given such an emotional reaction, one can easily see people going out of their way to avoid using the terminology that they might feel like they are being told to use.

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What would a good article on Bayesian liberty look like?

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What would a good article on Bayesian liberty look like?

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