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cleonid comments on Rational discussion of politics - Less Wrong Discussion
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The website is intended for discussion of all ideologically divisive issues that are currently avoided on LW (economic policies, historical analysis etc.).
Economic policies and historical analysis are not avoided on LW and are totally on-topic. Politics is avoided and would be off-topic. Do you understand the difference?
Hence, I would assume, the presence of the qualifier "ideologically divisive".
I don't see anything wrong with discussing ideologically divisive issues, and it occasionally happens here. Rationalism is useless unless you learn how to apply it in real life, and "ideologically divisive" issues are the ones most in need of rationalist analysis.
Take abortion. A rationalist analysis would probably include some known biological facts, some philosophical debate about the nature of consciousness and self, and some utilitarian calculus about trading one life for another.
On an issue like abortion I don't think we could really resolve the political argument by simply sitting down and spending a few days thinking rationally. But this is only because in my own analysis the problem reduces to issues of philosophy of mind and terminal ethical values that are still unresolved in general. But I do think that it would be an extremely useful exercise to see such a highly political issue discharged into a matter of facts, epistemic philosophy, and ethics, rather than tribalism.
I don't understand the difference. Would you please define your terms?
My understanding of "politics" and/or "policies" must differ from yours (Mark_Friedenbach's) & shminux's (and maybe ChristianKl's & Dahlen's too).
I understand public policy, economic policy included, to be a subset of politics. (I'd say some but not all historical analysis is political.) Given that, shminux's question reads as bizarre, as does the idea that "[e]conomic policies [...] are not avoided on LW and are totally on-topic" while "[p]olitics is avoided and would be off-topic".
"Politics" as the word is used here means tribalism: red vs blue. You pick a side that you identify with, that side has enemies, and you argue your position up and your enemies positions down. This is a built-in instinctual behavior in humans. It is also anti-rationalist (meaning, anti-truth-seeking). Remember the litany of Tarski: if the solution is True, I want to believe that the solution is Ture (my side is right). If the solution is not True, I want to believe that the solution is not True (my political opponent is right). Let me not become attached to beliefs I may want (no tribalism!).
Politics is tribalism over contentious issues. But just because there is widespread disagreement over what policy to implement, that doesn't mean that there can't be rationalist's agreement over which policy or policies are best. But you can't figure that out starting from a tribalistic mindset. So, rationalist policy discussion is welcome here. Politics (tribalism) is not.
Just because political matters are liable to be controversial discussion topics that may attract hotheads on both (or on all) sides of the debate, doesn't mean that the Official Definition of politics inherently includes tribalism. People just aren't versed in the art of steering political discussions towards productive outcomes, and that comes with experience, a good starting intelligence, and a great deal of wisdom. It wouldn't be impossible, for example, to have a LW Sequence on collaborative debates and getting along with debate partners.
Besides, there's a difference between discussing politics and doing politics; only the latter is Dark-Artsy almost by necessity.
Solutions are not true or false. They are effective or ineffective ways of accomplishing certain goals, which can be argued to be more or less worthy of pursuing. So there are (at least) two sides to your faction being "right". Where you want to go, and how you intend to get there. That's a very schematic summary of political discussion; it gets a lot more complicated than that, when you introduce instrumental goals, agents part of the same polity but with only partially overlapping values etc.
I'll generalize it even further: there are more and less optimal ways of accomplishing a certain goal and what is "optimal" depends on what are you optimizing for and the weights you assign to different values that you trade off against each other.
Politics is the business of governing. As this necessarily involves telling others what to do (or what not to do), it's no surprise that it gets contentious. There's also a lot of status at stake, making matters worse.
You can abstract away the details and have a rational discussion about what kinds of policies are better. You can make a good deal of progress by keeping things somewhat vague on the minutiae, but I don't expect even rationalists to be able to agree on the exact implementation details without a good amount of politicking.
As someone who has actually worked in government, I can tell you that politics is not the business of governing. Politics often gets in the way of actual governance. Think of the phrase "office politics" and all that it entails -- petty squabbling over power structures and influence, i.e. tribalism. I assure you that at the largest scale "office politics" very much exist. We just drop the "office" qualifier.
Government implements policy. Enacting policy is the goal of governance. Politics is a catch-all category for the social competition to establish policies which is intrinsic to human nature and exists in various forms in all cultures. As rationalists we have a better mechanism for deciding policy than glorified piss competitions that pass for politics today. But although we reject tribalistic politics we should not shy away from matters of policy.
Heh. The definition itself is contentious :-)
I would define politics as practical distribution and application of power. Accordingly, policies are rules for distribution and application of power.
What's the distinction between politics and policy then?
Policies are, basically, sets of rules. Politics is a activity, a sphere of human action.
There are loops here, of course. On the one hand, policies are implementation tools of politics, on the other hand, policies can define the rules by which the game of politics is played.
I'm not sure how that is different from what I said above, except presented in a different light.
That clarifies things, thanks (my definition of "politics" is indeed different).