I meant this post here, because this is the one you have posted here. However, if you would post here the other one, I would mean that one too.

Essentially, you should separate your main point from the specific political examples, and preferably use historical examples that no one cares about deeply. Mixing logic and emotionally powerful political examples together has the effect that people who don't share your political opinions may stop listening to the logic. Even the people who do share your political opinions may stop listening to the logic and just enjoy the fact that they found someone who agrees with them.

There is an evolutionary reason for this -- when politics get debated, joining the winning side makes you more likely to survive and reproduce than focusing on being right; especially in an ancient environment. (Yeah, maybe your leader proposes something that will make you all starve in winter; but if you oppose him now, you may get killed now, which is even worse for you.) As much as we try to avoid this effect, it exists. So it is better to get our points across without activating the "I have to join the winning side or die" circuits of our brains too much.

The downvotes without explanation are probably because people who are offended by your examples (because they disagree with you politically) just downvote and leave, and only those not offended remain and participate in the discussion.

Hi everyone.

I've already posted a couple of pieces - probably should have visited this page first, especially before posting my last piece. Well, such is life.

I headed over to LessWrong because I was/am a bit burned out by the high-octane conversations that go on online. I've disagreed with some things I've read here, but never wanted to beat my head - or someone else's - against a wall. So, I'm here to learn. I like the sequences have picked up some good points already - especially about replacing the symbol with the substance.

Question - what's the ettiquette about linking stuff from one's own blog? I'm not trying to do self-promotion here, but there's one or two ideas I've developed elsewhere & would find it useful to refer to them.

Meta: I really really like the ideas in the article, and they are important ones, but the style is... actually also very good, just... uhm... too inflammatory compared with the local norms.

Not sure what to say here, lest I sound like a Muslim saying: "You know, that picture of Mona Lisa is really nice, it just requires a few little modifications to conform to my faith, such as hiding the face of the lady."

Maybe just: please post on your own blog, then link here; and perhaps try to separate different ideas into different posts or at least clearly titled sections ("why are people sometimes prone to believe those who disagree with them are evil, and attribute them the worst reasons ignoring the obvious ones", "choose your identity wisely").

Hitchens was a friend to Kurdish and Iraqi socialists

Do you mean he actually had personal relationships with those people?

I don't think you can really generalize anything sociological from Online Liberals You Don't Like, due to selection bias.

One issue is that if you base your self-esteem on your rationality, that might make it more difficult to notice flaws in your rationality, for the same reasons as basing self-esteem on being a Nazi might've made it more difficult for historical Nazis to notice the issues. Hence the idea of keeping identity small, not including important things in it, to avoid that particular cause of misperceiving them.

See Cached Selves for more details. There does seem to be an important difference between the usual ideologies and technical subjects, in that ideologies allow much more wiggle room, which might be at the heart of the problem, see Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments. Sidestepping that sort of vagueness by making sure a few key ideas remain clear is also the approach explored in Yudkowsky's How To Actually Change Your Mind, for example see The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality and Human Evil and Muddled Thinking.

If you're really honest about your willingness to be rational, it seems like this could be kind of depressing.

Let's take one example: 99% of Afghans think that the punishment for apostasy should be death.

That number struck me as surprisingly high, so I went looking for the source and I think it's this. The 99% number is for "Muslims who favor making Islamic law the official law" in Afghanistan. The death-for-apostasy proportion is actually only 79% for pro-sharia Afghan Muslims (which is still 79% too high, but isn't 99%).

On the other hand, you get exactly that impression by reading... what the actual Nazis said, all the way to the top, and the experiences of people living through that period.

They also talked a great deal about the threat from Great Britain, France, the USA, and the USSR. You're completely ignoring this. If a word count were done, which would be bigger? I know what I expect. You're arguing that Hitler talked about the Jews a lot, which is totally uncontroversial, but does not prove your point: that he talked about Jews the most of all topics that concerned him.

During the height of the second world war, they insisted on using scarce resources like trains and troops to keep up the Jew killing - they were willing to risk their own war aims to complete this task.

You know what would be even more effective for pursuing an overriding terminal goal of killing Jews and nothing else? Not starting that war in the first place.

That's the problem: all the effort and resources thrown into the concentration camps late in the game absolutely pale in comparison to the efforts put into the war and rearmament - they wrecked the German economy just preparing for WWII, never mind actually running it.

You keep citing these books but you don't give any evidence from them.

The entire mass of Wages of Destruction, to focus on one, is devoted to marshaling the evidence and details about the reorganization of the German economy and Hitler's grand strategic plan (as mentioned in his Mein Kampf sequel, which I note you're not mentioning despite your interest in 'what the actual Nazis said') to fight the USA, in which the slave labor camps of millions of people (only some of which were Jews) were a late solution for acute labor shortages and the killings purely tangential. What am I going to do, paste the whole book inline? There's not any one detail that's decisive, it's the whole thrust of the reorganization of German society from the tiny inefficient farmer up to the industrial giants and his activities during the war which combine to show that Jews were a matter more of rhetoric than the overriding terminal end goal to which all of all Hitler's plans were subordinate, as you claim.

The very idea of a Nazi empire was to establish lebensraum for "pure" Aryans to repopulate.

Which is different from a terminal end-all-be-all goal of 'killing Jews'.

I think you're engaged in just motte-and-bailey tactics here: you make the claim Hitler's sole motivation was killing Jews, and when you get any pushback, you retreat to some well-established fact like 'a lot of Jews died' or 'there was a lot of anti-semitic education' or 'Hitler talked about the Jews a lot', which do not show your main claim.

What is "meddling in local affairs" in this context?

Overthrowing Muslim governments (including democratically elected governments), massive military, logistical, and even direct participation in Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran, invading and occupying various countries, etc. No, I don't believe US pop culture is a major reason they attack the US.