I've read it, and I believe it doesn't..

As a Brit, you already have a king/queen in your country.

And it's not paradise on Earth.

hough the king would be elected from among the re-invented Aristocracy in a meritocratic way,

How does that work? If an aristocrat's offpsring are crap, do they get thrown out of the aristocracy? If so, how does that differ from meritocracy?

The class of bright political ideas that would be a clear improvement is surprisingly large

But it doesn't include bringing back Kings.

This is why examples are important. You can't coclude "the world just doesn't want to listen to ideas, however, good" if the ideas , are in fact, terrible.

Thank you. I can relate to much of what you said, as isn't terribly rare here.

And the most enjoyable of the feelings evoked in me (as has happened on several occasions already), is seeing a young one being better and more promising than me.

(Though my enjoyment at being superseded is dangerous in the sense that such may be associated with laziness, so you are very welcome to not enjoy yours -- or enjoy, however you wish.)

The actual reason why I started to comment at all, however, is that it's amusing to note how I'm in a sense in the reverse of your situation. I found MIRI/SIAI over 10 years ago (and am almost that much older than you), started contributing to them then, but have recently refocused, of all things, on political system-building. Just what you left behind!

It would be complex and unnecessary to discuss here why I have done so, but let it be said that it's not because I wouldn't still consider MIRI's work to be of paramount importance. I do, but there are circumstances that I feel influence me towards a differing personal focus, among them certainly being a degree of laziness that I've come to joyfully accept of myself, after being more demandind earlier. Also, not putting all eggs in one basket.

Anyway, studying what's currently termed neoreaction (and associated things) is what I'm doing. For the heck of it, here's some early comments I recently wrote regarding that stuff.

(Also let it be noted that the difficult part in fixing politics is devising the ways in which one can actually get to implementing the bright ideas. The class of bright political ideas that would be a clear improvement is surprisingly large and easy to pick examples out of, but the class of ideas that one is likely to be able to implement is much more constrained.)

I think part of the difference between my experience and your statement, is that the liberals I know tend towards the libertarian end of the spectrum. At least on the drug issue, this might be a function of age.

The liberal argument against libertarianism is not that it is irrational to have a preference for liberty, but that (a) liberty is a more complicated concept than libertarians say it is (see Amartya Sen, for instance), (b) that libertarians often equivocated between the moral and practical arguments for libertarianism (see Yvain's non-libertarian FAQ, for instance), and (c) that the practical benefits are often not as-claimed (ibid).

Similarly, many liberals are in favor of certain sorts of regulations on sexual autonomy -- many oppose prostitution and traditional polygyny, for instance (there are, of course, a number of complications here, as well as variance among liberals). Some liberals also oppose the burqa and would criminalize clitoridectomy (this is more of a live issue in Europe). Finally, liberals tend to favor regulations against sexual harassment, which, defined broadly, could include some consensual conduct such as a consensual boss-subordinate relationship. In each of these cases, their arguments in these cases are similar to their arguments in the other cases where they favor regulation.

It's true that liberals often oppose regulations on sex which are either (a) based more-or-less solely on tradition, or (b) which affect only consensual conduct (I recognized that consent is a complex issue). I don't think case (a) is really an argument for liberal hypocrisy, because it is rare to find other cases where liberals support laws based solely on tradition (historical preservation districts might be one, although I have no idea whether liberals on average actually support them). Case (b) is the important one, and I can think of a couple of other cases where liberal views are similar to their views on sex. The first is drugs, where liberals are far more likely than conservatives (though of course less likely than libertarians) to want to reduce or remove regulations; the second is freedom of speech (although this varies dramatically by country, and liberal views on laws differ from their views on institutional rules). Some liberals also oppose most regulations on immigration.

Which supposedly-liberal arguments in favor of regulation do you think apply to which proposed regulation of sex?

And what particular bad effects do you see from the individual autonomy view of sex?

If I were not currently in a job that forbids me from taking on outside work, I would be the first to apply.

However, I'm currently in a job that forbids me from taking on outside work.

I have offered in the past to volunteer some time to this sort of thing, but I get that coordinating volunteers is harder than hiring people.

Though it's possible the reporter has twisted your words more than I manage to suspect

D'you think? You'll understand better after being reported-on yourself; and then you'll look back and laugh about how very, very naive that comment was. It's the average person's incomprehension of reporter-distorting that gives reporters their power. If you read something and ask, "Hm, I wonder what the truth was that generated this piece?" without having personal, direct experience of how very bad it is, they win.

I think the winning move is to read blogs by smart people, who usually don't lie, rather than anything in newspapers.

It's not so much the content as the presentation. The tone is incredibly self-absorbed and condescending. I thought the whole thing was a joke until I encountered the above quoted paragraph with its apparent sincerity. Presumably some of the content is intended to be tongue-in-check and some of it posturing, but it's difficult to separate. There's a compounding weirdness to the whole thing. Fetishes or open relationships or whatever aren't in themselves causes for concern but when somebody is trying to advocate for rationalism and a particular approach to ethics, the sense that you're following them somewhere very strange isn't good to have.

Let me try to make that clearer: Utilitarianism already has the problem of frequently sounding as if sociopaths are discussing ethics as something entirely abstract. Applying that to relationships, in the form of evangelical polyamory, takes it to another level of squeamishness (as others here have indicated). Seeing those ideas put into practice in the context of the dating profile of a self-professed sadist (who has been accused of wanting to take over the world, no less), replete with technical terminology ("primary", "dance card", etc), condescending advice to prospective conquests to help them overcome their fear of rejection and a general tone of callousness, sends it over the edge. Read straight, the profile could almost serve as a reductio for SIAI-brand ethics and rationality.

I'm also worried about who the intended audience is. Since I can't imagine anyone not deeply immersed in the Less Wrong community responding positively to it, I was left with the sense that perhaps our community's figurehead is (ab)using his position in ways that, as some else put it, "don't help the phyg pattern matching." It's basically an advertisement saying, "I'm a leader in small community x and I'm open to your sexual advances, so don't be shy."

Transhumanism seems to hold people's interests until around the time they turn 40, when the middle-aged reality principle (aging and mortality) starts to assert itself. It resembles going through a goth phase as a teenager.

BTW, I find it interesting that Peter Thiel's name keeps coming up in connection with stories about the singularity, as in the New York Observer one, when he has gone out of his way lately to argue that technological progress has stagnated. Thiel has basically staked out an antisingularity position.

(I'm assuming that your complaint is about the interview quality on LW topics, rather than the physical intimacy, which we can assume is present but was amplified in the writing process. Honestly there are several things I think your comment could be about, so fortunately my problems with it are general)

I think this comment is uncharitable. Which you kind of knew already. And which, by itself, isn't so bad.

But unfortunately, you fall into the fundamental attribution error here, and explain other peoples' failings as if they were inherent properties of those people - and not only do you mentally assign people qualities like "sucks at explaining," you generalize this to judge them as whole people. Not only is this a hasty conclusion, but you're going to make other people feel bad, because people generally don't like being judged.

I can understand the impulse "I would have done much better," but I would much rather you kept things constructive.