There is no politics without a fight, and that conflict is still well worth having. If intelligent minds don't matter to the fight, then the fight would, by definition, not be worth having.

Intelligent minds don't fight battles because they see an injustice but because they think that they can have an effect by fighting a particular battle.

To the topic Rop Gonggri speech at the 27th Chaos Computer Congress comes to mind. Rop was involved in Wikileaks and it was just a few months after the banking blockade against Wikileaks started.

People ask me “Anonymous… That is the hackers striking back, right?” And then I have to explain that unlike Anonymous, people in this community would probably not issue press release with our real names in the PDF metadata. And that if this community were to get involved, the targets would probably be offline more often.

This is a mental maturity issue: our community has generally succeeded in giving black belts in computer security karate only to people that have proven a certain level of mental maturity. Yes, some of us could probably do some real damage to Paypal and Mastercard. But then we also understand that no good comes from that. In the unlikely event that someone here has not yet reached this level of maturity, please do not connect your machine to the network and talk to some of the other people here for additional perspective.

Children get angry when someone takes away there toys. In modern complicated political conflicts getting angry doesn't help. It's much better to have mental maturity and think things through.

Understanding when blue/green thinking prevents you from accurately thinking about an issue and it mind kills you is important if you want to achieve political goals.

I did see Julian Assange two times live in Berlin on the Chaos Computer Congress. I never did participate in Wikileaks myself but I have seen a bunch of people who did at the Chaos Computer Congress and know how they think politically. They aren't the kind of people who are angry but rather think that you are naive for getting angry. They think of the anonymous crowd who does DDoS out of anger as immature.

At the last LessWrong meetup I attended I did propose to another attendee a specific way to be politically active and a signifcant amount of energy in it.

Yeah, I'm verbose, but newborn synthetic intelligences here shouldn't have any trouble scanning what I'm saying.

At the same time it shows that you don't care enough about the ideas that you are advocating to write them in a way that's more likely to be persuasive. You care more about signaling that you are angry than about doing something that wins political battles.

It's to engage the general populace rationally, using the time-tested means that have previously produced good results (informed democracy; agitation).

You don't engage people rationally by being angry. CFAR which came out of this community is engaging in trying to teach the general populace rational thinking. They don't try to teach them political answers but they try to teach them to think for themselves.

For all your pretense of wanting to push individuality you think that you should focus on teaching others your answers to political question instead of teaching them to think for themselves. CFAR goes another way.

HPMoR is also quite political when it tries to hone down lessons such as the importance of taking responsibility to safe other people instead of just following a role. The way Harry tries to teach evil Draco rationality to turn him good is a proposal for political action.