Ban music in political campaign advertisements. Music has no logical or factual content, and only adds emotional bias.

Here's an example of an ad with music intended to give two different emotional tones (optimistic/patriotic in the first six seconds, then sinister in the rest).

1) This strikes me as careful cherrypicking of "absurd" results to pick only the non-absurd "absurd" ones. You're supposed to say "well, giving women rights isn't so absurd after all, people who thought it is absurd were mistaken", but not all absurd conclusions from the past turned out to be okay in hindsight. Some were pretty horrible.

2) People who say "it is okay if my moral reasoning produces absurd results" generally don't personally think "that sounds absurd, but I'll accept it anyway". Typically, the result is something they are strongly motivated to believe, but which is thought absurd by others. They welcome the moral reasoning because it provides a way to reject their critics.

(In the LW-sphere, there are people who actually do accept results that seem personally absurd, but the LW-sphere is a minority. Most people don't act that way. Go tell a vegetarian that he should support exterminating all wildlife to end wild animal suffering, and see what response you get.)

3) Rejecting reasoning that produces absurd results even if we can't find a flaw in the reasoning is an important way we avoid errors.

Efficient Outrage Hypothesis: if you're hearing about it, it's probably already a dogpile. The return on marginal outrage will be low or negative.

-- Egregore Peck (source)

If your moral reasoning doesn’t produce conclusions that seem absurd on the face of it… why are you bothering? I want to be the sort of person who would have come up with the absurd conclusion that slavery is wrong, or the absurd conclusion that women should have rights, or the absurd conclusion that sodomy shouldn’t be illegal.

-- Ozy Frantz (source)

Please note that Rational Attire was not run by MIRI. It was always completely separate from MIRI.

I'm thinking if there are some non-traditional ways an elected politician could create a lot of utility.

What exactly are the "super powers" of the elected politician? What can they do better than before? The ability to have 1 vote in 400 is the obvious answer, but there is certainly more, both formal and informal. Maybe you actually have a very little formal power, but I'd guess that many people will overestimate it. If many people suddenly start taking you much more seriously than before, how can you use that? (I am thinking about speaking with those people personally, because if you publish something in the media, your opponents will say the opposite thing, and the public discussion will go somewhere different than you originally wanted.)

Maybe I am naive here, but I think that calling someone and saying "I am a state representative, and I believe you have the power to improve this country, can I have a talk with you?" will instantly get attention of most people. But how to use it properly? (Also, those people will probably expect you to have unlimited power and money, and their further thinking may get totally focused on that idea.) One power you have is to make people feel important, if you e.g. promise to mention them on your blog. Or, if people are willing to talk with you, you could use this to connect people you believe should cooperate, by inviting them to the same debate.

Okay, maybe these are not the brightest ideas, but the general idea is to think about opportunities other than voting.

Steven Kaas:

You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going "a most judicious choice, sire".

Mason Hartman made a great typographic meme of this at Pretty Rational.

Catharine G. Evans (aristophy):

This immortal galactic supermind is a stub. You can help expand it by providing the proper technology and averting human extinction.

Aaron Haspel:

Some of the people who earn thousands of times your income don't deserve it, which is bad; and some of them do, which is worse.

Aaron Haspel:

Our collective delusion that we can fix most problems appears to be one of the many problems that we cannot fix.