"valuable goals" break down in a lot of different types but the key difference here is: If you work toward the valuable goal of keeping people from starving, and you do some work but don't fix the problem, at least you've fed SOME concrete people. If you work toward creating a political ideology and fail, you've done nothing of any use to anybody. Politics, like celebrity and sports are zero sum, the more famous you are the LESS famous someone else is. There are already millions of people working to achieve fame and power through politics, and importantly, they want to do it at your expense, they want you not to have that power. This means that unless you have large leverage on politics, the time you spend on it will simply be wasted.
and you do some work but don't fix the problem, at least you've fed SOME concrete people.
Really not true at all. At least in the US, there aren't a lot of starving people down the street for you to feed.
If you work on fixing "the problem" of starving people, you can spend endless hours designing a "fix", organizing other people, "consciousness raising", fund raising, and organizing logistics without ever feeding a single person a single meal.
...This means that unless you have large leverage on politics, the time you spend
Related to: Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, Logical Rudeness
Politics is sometimes hard to discuss. Partly since most of us seem to unconsciously take political matters with the same degree of seriousness as our forefathers used to, because we use the same mode of thought as they used to. Back then, a bad political choice or alliance, could mean death, while the normal cost today in a democratic society might be ridicule for having supported the losing team or position.
Nevertheless, politics should be taken seriously. Bad politics means that it'll take longer for us humans to reach world peace, an end to hunger and disease, and favourable conditions so that no one will create an unfriendly AI. Therefore, discussing politics is vital so that, someday, some collective actions could be performed to alter the political course for the better.
But what should that collective action be? - what should the new course(s) be? - and who should do it? - and what does "for the better" imply? To engage in politics one needs to be able to give some (implicit or explicit) answers to these questions. This can be done, and in so doing one has constructed a political ideology - which might be similar to existing ideologies or it might be different.
A political ideology might be constructed in various ways. In this and a few more posts I will propose one way of doing that. These posts might be seen as a tutorial in constructing a political ideology. In these posts I will not suggest an answer to what the best political system should be, nor will I follow my own instructions. But if one should follow these instructions I believe that one can answer the questions mentioned above.
Political ideologies might be constructed in various other ways. The one I discuss in my following posts is based on two principles: (1) that one should not propose an answer until one has thought about the question extensively, and (2) that one should consider the most important questions first.
Before writing the next post, here are the points I will discuss in each of them - I will write the posts as an instruction manual so I'll address you, dear reader, through them out:
Next post "The Domain of Politics"