Politics Discussion Thread September 2012

Multiheaded

The last thread didn't fare too badly, I think; let's make it a monthly tradition. (Me, I'm more interested in thinking about real-world policies or philosophies, actual and possible, rather than AI design or physics, and I suspect that many fine, non-mind-killed folks reading LW also are - but might be ashamed to admit it!)

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

Asked in this form, this is a request for collecting information about distribution of opinions in the form of a few self-filtered anecdotes. The data thus collected is completely useless,

Suppose then that we do collect such data. In what way would it be useful for the purpose of a theoretical discussion?

No, the data is not completely useless. Limited sampling of a distribution can give you information about the different clusters in the distribution, if not the relative frequency of samples in those clusters.

There are only so many basic arguments for a position. I wanted to see if the clever folks here had one I hadn't heard before.

I was making a distinction between arguments for a position and statements of a position. The words "asked in this form" in my comment referred to the way you phrased the question, which was as stated about positions and not arguments. Thankfully, the responses were mostly about arguments, although a couple of them opened with statements of positions, which was the unhelpful bit, whose flaws were the topic of my comment.

(Nice point about limited biased samples being adequate for discovering clusters. It seems that this way you may form non-hopeless hypotheses with much less effort than is necessary to quantitatively judge them.)