All of Metanaute's Comments + Replies

That rather depends on who's building it, doesn't it? If you're talking about Eliezer et al's FAI concept, I get the impression that they're mostly concerned with issues that aren't presently politicized among anyone except perhaps bioethicists. It does entail solving some political problems along the way, but how is underspecified, and I don't see a meaningful upside to viewing any of the relevant design problems through a partisan lens at this stage. In any case, that's (again) not what the OP is about.

Avoiding, not ignoring. Ignoring the problem is what "dumb monkey status games etc." points towards, and it almost invariably leads to expressing a wide variety of unexamined but basically partisan stances which are assumed to just be common sense (because, in the social context they come from, they are). The failures following from this should be obvious.

Yes. No. Seriously. I'm not trying to fall into the common nerd mistake of saying "politics is dumb monkey status games for normals" here; political processes serve an important role in solving coordination problems and we ignore them at our peril. But that's really not what the OP is getting at. It's saying that enormous and nearly intractable biases surround ideology; that we systematically overestimate the importance of conventional partisanship; and that there's value in structuring our arguments and social spaces to skirt these issues, or at least not to light ourselves on fire and run toward them while shouting COME AT ME, BRO. All of these statements are true.

Betteridge's law of headlines states that any headline followed by a question mark can be answered by the word "no". Isn't it surprising that the same principle can be extended to rhetorical questions about politics outside the domain of news?

I will even add a crazy hypothesis. The dynamics of this thread (and its underlying cause) is exactly what is preventing the LW community from FOOMing.