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gothgirl420666 comments on Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
While there quite likely is some degree of resolvable factual disagreement about the extent of certain inequities, and maybe-somewhat-resolvable disagreement about how those inequities might be lessened, there is also disagreement about how much those inequities should matter to us and affect our behavior, both political and personal. This is not the sort of disagreement I expect to see someone resolve in a blog post.
Now for a more blatantly left-wing argument: It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. This is not the sort of thing that can be communicated by presenting scientific studies, because such studies may establish the existence of an inequity, but they do not fully convey the impact of that inequity on the lives and psyches of the population affected. The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people, a difficult thing to do on a website with demographics like LW has.
I'll be honest, it was really difficult for me to understand the linked wiki page. (I need to learn economics...) It sounds like what you're saying is maybe leftists tend to inherently value socioeconomic equality more than rightists do? But... I don't understand how this applies to race and gender.
(This is of interest to me because I'm currently politically agnostic and I plan on someday doing an unbiased inquiry in order to figure out what my views should be. Knowing what the disagreement between the left and the right stems from would be very useful.)
As for your last point, I can definitely see why privileged people would need emotional arguments to understand how marginalized people suffer. I think here on LW we have a perhaps deserved mistrust of emotional appeals in moral tradeoffs - we all know about scope insensitivity and how one dying child feels more painful than seven. The logical brain really does better than the emotional brain on this kind of stuff a lot of the time. But on the other hand, I can see how maybe I, a man, value sexual harassment as -5 utilons, whereas if I take the time to read an article explaining how sexual harassment feels from a female perspective I will realize that it should be more like -15 utilons. So my utilitarian math will be off unless I re-calibrate.
I disagree though that it's necessarily a difficult thing to do on LessWrong. Well, perhaps difficult, but definitely not impossible. I remember a blog post by Yvain where he was talking about unemployment, and at the beginning he linked to an article of some woman's experience in a terrible job, saying "read this first to get an emotional calibration for just how terrible minimum wage jobs can be". I don't see why we can't do the same here. It's not that hard to find stories of marginalized people's experiences on the Internet now that Tumblr SJ is becoming such a thing.