I have been thinking about politics again, this time from a meta level and considering motivations for positions.

Among my peer group and much of the media, the dominant model seems to be 'anyone who has center-right views is consumed by hate and/or a useful idiot for the evil ones, and anyone who has further right views is a jackbooted fascist'.

Now, given that the views they cannot tolerate are nothing compared to the NRxers, in a way this strikes me as absurd hysteria. But in another way this makes sense (except for the overreaction). I don't think most people really grasp that, for instance, P(women are better at maths than men on average) should be independent of whether one wants it to be true, or whether one hates women. And while LWers probably grasp this in theory, I would doubt that these beliefs and values are actually uncorrelated among LWers, since we are not perfect Baysian reasoners (or, to put it another way, there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path).

So far, this is probably fairly obvious. Its also fairly clear that, unless everyone believes you to be a perfect Bayesian reasoner, it is certainly possible that by holding certain beliefs you are signalling moral stances even though this should be independent.

When I worried that the correlation between testosterone and politics means that political opinions are hopelessly biased by emotions, it was pointed out to me that it could be valid for emotions to affect values if not probability estimates. At the time I accepted this, but now I have largely changed my mind, at least WRT politics on LW.

The reason is that whatever we value, we should hold that the survival of civilisation is a subgoal. (Voluntary human extinction movement excepted).

As an example, there are NRxers who believe that there is a substantial probability that tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civilisation. I don't believe this, but to leave a line of retreat... well, IIRC future civilisation could be between 30 orders of magnitude and infinitely bigger than current civilisation, dependent upon the laws of physics. I put it to you that if

P(tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civiliseation)-P(tolerance of homosexuality will save civiliseation)>10^-30

Then a utilitarian has to be against tolerance of homosexuality, and it doesn't matter whether you hate gays or not, it doesn't matter if you have gay friends or indeed if you are gay. Its a simple (edit: actually, its quite complicated) cost-benefit calculation. (Although, of course this does not mean that campaigning on this points would be a productive use of your time).

If you have a different utility function than 'value all human-equivlanet life-years equally', then I think this argument should still hold with only slight changes. 10^30 is a very big number, after all.

I should emphasise that I'm not saying that this does justify homophobia. For one thing, I think that a general principal of not defecting against people who do not defect against you could arguably help save civilisation. What I am saying is that the issue of whether we should tolerate homosexuality (for instance) should be a matter of probability estimates and values almost all of us hold in common. Whether one actually loves or hates gays is irrelevant.

That different rationalists hold wildly differing opinions on this matter (as with various other political matters), and moreover polarised positions, is bad news for Aumann's agreement theorem and motivated cognition and so forth.

Or perhaps it is a sign that deontological or virtue ethics have advantages? I am aware that what I have written probably sounds shockingly cold and calculating to many people.

EDIT: I am not trying to say that tolerance of homosexuality fails the cost-benefit calculation. I am not trying to pick on left-wing people for saying that their opponents are evil, I used to think that anyone who was against of homosexuality was evil, but then I changed my mind. I realise the right wing also uses 'my political opponents are evil' retoric, but the left tries to frame everything as heroic rebels vs the evil empire, with an almost complete refusal to discuss or consider actual policies, whereas I think the right discusses actual politics more.

And whoever just downvoted every single comment in the thread, you are not helping.