Query: by what objective criteria do we determine whether a political decision is rational?

I propose that the key elements -- necessary but not sufficient -- are (where "you" refers collectively to everyone involved in the decisionmaking process):

• you must use only documented reasoning processes:
  • use the best known process(es) for a given class of problem
  • state clearly which particular process(es) you use
  • document any new processes you use
• you must make every reasonable effort to verify that:
  • your inputs are reasonably accurate, and
  • there are no other reasoning processes which might be better suited to this class of problem, and
  • there are no significant flaws in in your application of the reasoning processes you are using, and
  • there are no significant inputs you are ignoring

If an argument satisfies all of these requirements, it is at least provisionally rational. If it fails any one of them, then it's not rational and needs to be corrected or discarded.

This is not a circular definition (defining "rationality" by referring to "reasonable" things, where "reasonable" depends on people being "rational"); it is more like a recursive algorithm, where large ambiguous problems are split up into smaller and smaller sub-problems until we get to a size where the ambiguity is negligible.

This is not one great moral principle; it is more like a self-modifying working process (subject to rational criticism and therefore improvable over time -- optimization by successive approximation). It is an attempt to apply the processes of science (or at least the same reasoning which arrived at those processes) to political discourse.

So... can we agree on this?

This is a hugely, vastly, mindbogglingly trimmed-down version of what I originally posted. All comments prior to 2010-08-26 20:52 (EDT) refer to that version, which I have reposted here for comparison purposes and for the morbidly curious. (It got voted down to negative 6. Twice.)

Why do long, uninspiring, and seemingly-childish debates sometimes emerge even in a community like LessWrong?  And what can we do about them?  The key is to recognize the potentially harsh environmental effect of an audience, and use a dying debate to fertilize a more sheltered private conversation.

Let me start by saying that LessWrong generally makes excellent use of public debate, and naming two things I don't believe are solely responsible for fruitless debates here: rationalization biases and self-preservation¹.  When your super-important debate grows into a thorny mess, the usual aversion to say various forms of "just drop it" are about signaling that:

1. you're not skilled enough to continue arguing, so you'd look bad,
2. the other person isn't worth your time, in which case they'd be publicly insulted and compelled to continue with at least one self-defense comment, extending the conflict, or
3. the other person is right, which would risk spreading what appear to be falsehoods.

"Stop the wrongness", the last concern, is in my opinion the most perisistent here simply because it is the least misguided.  It's practically the name of the site.  Many LessWrong users seem to share a sincere, often altruistic desire to share truth, abolish falsehood, and overcome conflict.  Public debate is a selection mechanism generally used very effectively here to grow and harvest good arguments.  But we can still benefit from diffusing the weed-like quibbling that sometimes shows up in the harsh environment of debate, and for that you need a response that avoids the problematic signals above.  So try this:

"I'm worried that debating this more here won't be useful to others, but I want to keep working on it with you, so I'm responding via private message.  Let's post on it again once we either agree or better organize our disagreement.  Hopefully at least one of us will learn and refine a new argument from this conversation."

Take a moment to see how this carefully avoids (1)-(3).  Then you can try changing the tone of the private message to be more collaborative than competitive; the change in medium will help mark the transition.  This way you'll each be less afraid of having been wrong and more concerned with learning to be right, so rationalization bias will also be diminished.  As well, much social drama can disintegrate without the pressure of the audience environment (I imagine this might contribute to couples fighting more after they have children, though this is just anecdotal speculation).  Despite being perhaps obvious, these effects are not to be underestimated!

But hang on...  if you're convinced someone is very wrong, is it okay to leave such a debate hanging midstream in public?  Why doesn't "stop the wrongness" trump our social concerns and compel us to flog away at our respective puddles of horsemeat?