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pragmatist comments on Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 29 July 2013 10:26PM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 August 2013 04:58:28AM *  7 points [-]

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.

As a right-winger I must strongly disagree with the characterization of the right wing position given in your comment. In particular it seems to me that the left-wing position contains a number of specific falsifiable (and false) beliefs, for example, the false belief that all the policies leftists tend to promote to "help the poor and oppressed" actually help the poor and oppressed in the long run.

In fact the main value disagreement that I can see is that some leftist tend to have a pathological form of egalitarianism where they're willing to pursue policies that make everyone worse off in order to make the distribution more equal.

Comment author: pragmatist 09 August 2013 06:28:44AM *  1 point [-]

I did say this:

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.

So I agree there are a number of falsifiable beliefs on both sides. But the mere fact of falsifiability doesn't mean the disagreements are easy to resolve, partly for "politics is the mind-killer" type reasons, and partly because it is legitimately difficult to find conclusive experimental evidence for causal claims in the social sciences.

I do, however, think there are important value disagreements about how to trade off efficiency and equity between left and right, and I also think your description of the "main value disagreement" is a caricature. I'm pretty sure I could easily come up with socio-political thought experiments where all (non-moral) facts are made explicit, leaving no room for disagreement on them, but where we would still disagree about the best policy, and I assure you I'm not one of the "pathological" egalitarians you describe (although you would probably consider my views pathological for other reasons).