For that, past data on actions constitutes the most vital information.
Exactly. Which is why manipulating the past data is essential in politics. Exaggerating the differences between ABCD and A'B'C'D'; and/or claiming that WXYZ never happened and was just an enemy propaganda. You can teach people to cluster incorrectly, if you make your clustering criteria well known.
(As an example, you can teach people to classify "national socialism" as something completely opposite and unrelated to "socialism"; and you can also convince them that whatever experiences people had with "socialism" in the past, are completely unrelated to the experiences we would have with "socialism" in the future. This works even on people who had first-hand experience, and works better on people who didn't have it.)
Today's post, Traditional Capitalist Values was originally published on 17 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.