TL;DR: what actual useful outcomes are there of political discourse for people who don't have political advocacy as an area of comparative advantage?

I think the ability to discuss politics clearly is one of the biggest successes of rationality, perhaps because politics breaks minds so thoroughly. It is ironic then, that it's not obvious whether this is of any use whatsoever to the majority of us. I don't believe that political advocacy is my area of comparative advantage, and with the general aspie nature of LWers I would assume this probably applies to most of us. Indeed, the main effect of thinking rationally about politics that I can't stand non-rationalist politics anymore. Having the correct political views is of some small benefit, although since no general election has ever been won or lost by one vote, its very unlikely to change anything.

Are there other benefits to having accurate political views? Some people, largely on both the far left and the far right think that total social collapse is likely within a few decades. I think they might be partially right - for instance, in Europe previously fringe parties are becoming mainstream, both communists protesting against austerity and nationalists protesting against immigration. In Greece, actual neo-Nazis have won seats. If there is another financial crash happens (which again, I think is likely, quite probably before the end of the year) then as countries go totally bankrupt because they are still in debt from the last crash, we will see extremist parties getting into power, which probably make the situation worse (not that communism and nationalism will always cause disasters, but I don't trust panicking electorates to vote in people who can do it properly, and if half the population goes right and half goes left this causes more problems like riots).

Anyway, I seem to have digressed, but my point is, if one can predict that society is going to collapse, would that be useful? Not really, as far as I can tell. Its more difficult to make money from a collapse than from a boom, and the timescales are too long anyway. If you hold the converse opinion, that the future will be ok, then the advice that leads to is simply "buy indexes" which is standard advice anyway.

If I decided that society is likely to collapse, is that useful because it gives me warning to get out while there is still time? Not really - only the really paranoid people think that things are going to get really bad in the immediate future. Even if I thought there was likely to be total collapse, and outcome so bad that I need to leave, as opposed to the far more likely outcome of general stagnation, the predictions are still decades in advance, and one does not need that much time to prepare to leave.

Is there some way politics could be useful applying to the way I interact with other people? Some people might say that its important to put aside subconscious prejudices everyone has. But, generally I would say that subconscious prejudices are just wrong on a probabilistic level - even if some characteristic does vary between group A and group B of people, one is far better off just measuring the characteristic directly, in most cases.

I think some of what I've written pattern-matches to being slightly crazy, but what I am trying to ask is whether there is any benefit to having accurate views about politics. Personally, I think I spend too much time thinking about politics because I find it interesting, and it feels like I'm doing something useful. But maybe this feeling of being useful is an illusion, and thinking about politics is no more useful than watching TV.