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.
Maybe one could influence malfunctioning government-run services to behave better. If some DMV office or post office is notoriously slow or broken, one could send a letter with official letterhead saying that your constituents are complaining and you'd like to speak to the manager to find out what the problem is. Then actually find out what the problem is, have them work out a plan to solve it, and report back to you on their progress. If necessary, mention that there's currently a big push in the Senate to cut back for poorly-performing services.
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.
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.
Our collective delusion that we can fix most problems appears to be one of the many problems that we cannot fix.
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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.
I don't think Ozy is claiming that all absurd conclusions are correct. Rather, Ozy claims that some absurd conclusions are correct. When you just need an existence proof, there's no cherry-picking - you just pick your example/s and you're done.
Maybe they should! My impression is that Ozy does.
Ozy's a vegetarian, and their position on wild animal suffering is:
Seems pretty open to absurdity to me.
I'd prefer the framing of applying an absurdity penalty to one's estimated probability, rather than "rejecting" it in a binary way, but yes: absurdity could be a useful thing to weight in one's estimated probability of a conclusion being correct.