It seems to me that in at least some of these examples you are confusing the map with the territory. Take genetics:

Genes don't proliferate by being good for the species; they win by being good for themselves.

Failing to be "good for the species" is not a fact about evolution, or genes. Thinking that evolution was supposed to be "good for the species" was just a heuristic humans used when trying to understand evolution. The "selfish gene" does not say anything meaningful about the phenomenon of evolution, it just shows that we have refined our understanding of evolution.

Now take politics:

Why do governments inevitably end up run by career lawyers and politicians instead of scientists and economists?

What does the phenomenon of government actually look like, in reality? Well, it looks like a system of human hierarchical organization in which career lawyers and politicians have a natural propensity to be on top. Thinking that the phenomenon of government has anything to do with understanding nuanced social issues is confusing the map with the territory.

More the latter than the former.. a social norm stemming from the pragmatic observation that discussions about politics tended to have certain properties that lowered their value.

The question recurs regularly, usually in the form of "well, but, if we're really rational, shouldn't we be able to talk about politics?"

To my mind, the people asking the question frequently neglect the second-order effects of regularly talking about politics on the sort of people who will join LW and what their primary goals are.

I have seen this problem afflict other intellectually-driven communities, and believe me, it is a very hard problem to shake. Be grateful we aren't getting media attention. The adage, "All press is good press", has definitely been proven wrong.

Hello, I am Nicholas, an undergraduate studying music at Portland State University. Even though my (at least academic) primary area of study is the arts, the philosophy of rationality and science has always been a large part of my intellectual pursuits. I found this site about a year ago and read many articles, but I recently decided to try to participate. Even before I was a rationalist, my education was entirely self-driven by a desire to seek the truth, even when the truth conflicted with what was widely believed by those around me (teachers, parents, etc.) My idea of what "the truth" means has changed significantly over time, especially after learning about rationality theory, Baye's theorem, and many of the concepts on this site, but the core emotional drive for knowledge has never wavered.

I have read Politics is the Mind Killer and understand the desire to avoid political discussions, but I feel that my conception of a "good" political discussion is significantly different than most users of this site. I care nothing for US style partisan politics. Far from exclusively arguing for "my home team", my political ideas have changed dramatically over the years, and are always based on actual existing phenomenon rather than words like "socialism", "capitalism, "republican" or "democrat". I would be interested to know what led to this ban on political thought. Is it a widely held view of the community that political discussion is inherently devoid of rationality, or was it a decision made out of historical necessity, perhaps because of an observed trend of the quality of political discussions? In either case, I would like to gain a better understanding of the arguments and attempt to refute them.

I've been looking into this, and have commented about it briefly here. I think I may hold off on future experimentation until I get this kit.

The takeaway is that there definitely appears to be an effect. Getting that effect to be positive seems more difficult, however. For example, a problem with this kit is going to be getting the electrodes in the right spots- see all of those dots on that image they have? It may be that missing the correct placement by a centimeter gives you a significantly different effect, and so I'm sort of leery of doing this more without finding a training video for EEGs or something.

(Also, going off the diagram they have, we did have the current going the right direction in our setup.)

Am I correct in (roughly) summarizing your conclusion in the following quote?

Yes, there really is morality, and we can locate it in reality — either as a set of facts about the well-being of conscious creatures, or as a set of facts about what an ideally rational and perfectly informed agent would prefer, or as some other set of natural facts.

If so, what is the logical difference between your theory and moral relativism? What if a person's set of natural facts for morality is "those acts which the culture I was born into deem to be moral"?

I view intellectual property as the logical conclusion of the "unhealthiness" Eliezer is describing. I laugh when I look at all the ridiculous patents and copyrights that exist, but then I get scared when I remember that someone can use legal force against me for discovering those ideas simply because they discovered them first.

This, I think, is a major part of it, that it doesn't seem you've accounted for:

The "free will" debate is a confusion because, to answer the question on the grounds of the libertarians is to already cede their position. The question they ask: "Can I make choices, or does physics determine what I do?"

Implicit in that question is a definition of the self that already assumes dualism. The questions treats the self as a ghost in the machine, or a philosophy student of perfect emptiness. The libertarians imagine that we should be able to make decisions not only apart from physics, but apart from anything. They are treating the mind as a blank slate that should be able to take in information and output consequences based on nothing whatsoever.

If, instead, you apply the patternist theory of mind, you start with the self as "an ongoing collection of memories and personality traits." (Simplified, of course.) From that point, you can reduce the question to a reductio ad absurdum. Say that one of my personality traits is a love and compassion for animals, and we're asking the question, "Do I have the free will to run over this squirrel?" Replace "physics" with "personality": Can I make the choice to run over this squirrel, or does my personality decide what I do?

THAT doesn't seem so confusing to us. OF COURSE your personality and memories decide your actions. If you decided to run over the squirrel out of deathlust, you would probably think you've gone temporarily insane or somesuch. You would probably feel as if it wasn't really you who decided to kill the squirrel. It's possible for it to happen, but only if events out of your control come in and zap your mind with the temporary crazies. It is perfectly normal for your decisions to be decided by things that you cannot directly control yourself, and nobody seems to have a problem with this.

The case is no different for physics.

I'd start with that. From there, the explanation of why people get think they have libertarian free will should make more sense. We can imagine ourselves killing the squirrel, which leads us to believe we have libertarian free will. But that is irrelevant: someone who actually chose to kill the squirrel would be a different set of memories and personality traits, and it should not be controversial that they would also be a somewhat different physical makeup.