Political disputes are usually about moral disagreements is an improvement over what I said.
If my meta-ethics is right, that assertion and my original are isomorphic. And if your metaethics is right, my assertion risks being very misleading.
This may not be a good assesment of how you are using it, but I think "fundamental terminal value differences" is often used as an excuse to stop thinking about moral questions that you really should be thinking about.
Absolutely. This is one of the central lessons my sentence was intended to impart.
Failing the is-ought distinction is a predictable effect of failing to realize that one is having a terminal value dispute.
Explain. I don't see it.
On reflection, I think I was over-hasty here. Failing to notice that a political dispute arises out of a moral dispute tends to cause people to treat moral propositions as facts - to gain political advantage (aka mindkiller). But "is-ought confusion" is usually used as the label for treating facts as moral conclusions. Since that doesn't function as naturally for political advantage, it probably isn't as direct a consequence of artificial divide of politics & morals.
So apparently Richard Feynman once said:
I could be missing something, but this strikes me as a terrible answer.
When was the atomic hypothesis confirmed? If I recall correctly, it was only when chemists started noticing that the outputs of chemical reactions tended to factorize a certain way, which is to say that it took millennia after Democritus to get the point where the atomic hypothesis started making clearly relevant experimental predictions.
How about, "Stop trying to sound wise and come up with theories that make precise predictions about things you can measure in numbers."
I noticed this on Marginal Revolution, so I shall also state my candidate for the one most important sentence about macroeconomics: "You can't eat gold, so figure out how the heck money is relevant to making countries actually produce more or less food." This is a pretty large advance on how kings used to think before economics. I mean, Scott Sumner is usually pretty savvy (so is Richard Feynman btw) but his instruction to try to understand money is likely to fall on deaf ears, if it's just that one sentence. Think about money? Everyone wants more money! Yay, money! Let's build more gold mines! And "In the short run, governments are not households"? Really, Prof. Cowen, that's what you'd pass on to the next generation as they climb up from the radioactive soil?
*Cough.* Okay, I'm done. Does anyone want to take their own shot at doing better than Feynman did for their own discipline?