I've been reading a lot of the recent LW discussions on politics and gender, and noticed that people rarely bring up or explicitly acknowledge that different people affected by some political or gender issue have different values/preferences, and therefore solving the problem involves a strong element of bargaining and is not just a matter of straightforward optimization. Instead, we tend to talk as if there is some way to solve the problem that's best for everyone, and that rational discussion will bring us closer to finding that one best solution.
For example, when discussing gender-related problems, one solution may be generally better for men, while another solution may be generally better for women. If people are selfish, then they will each prefer the solution that's individually best for them, even if they can agree on all of the facts. (It's unclear whether people should be selfish, but it seems best to assume that most are, for practical purposes.)
Unfortunately, in bargaining situations, epistemic rationality is not necessarily instrumentally rational. In general, convincing others of a falsehood can be useful for moving the negotiated outcome closer to one's own preferences and away from others', and this may be done more easily if one honestly believes the falsehood. (One of these falsehoods may be, for example, "My preferred solution is best for everyone.") Given these (subconsciously or evolutionarily processed) incentives, it seems reasonable to think that the more solving a problem resembles bargaining, the more likely we are to be epistemicaly irrationality when thinking and talking about it.
If we do not acknowledge and keep in mind that we are in a bargaining situation, then we are less likely to detect such failures of epistemic rationality, especially in ourselves. We're also less likely to see that there's an element of Prisoner's Dilemma in participating in such debates: your effort to convince people to adopt your preferred solution is costly (in time and in your and LW's overall sanity level) but may achieve little because someone else is making an opposite argument. Both of you may be better off if neither engaged in the debate.
I think the problem is that where you can openly describe the conflicts, you can also openly propose game-theoretical solutions. You can say: "We should live in peace with people of Sylvania... but if they attack us, we will not hesitate to fight against them too." And then you can explain why you think this is a good strategy, instead of e.g. us attacking first.
In the gender questions today, we are not culturally allowed to describe the nature of the conflict, which is: different reproduction mechanisms leading to different reproduction strategies leading to conflicts of interest.
So instead of stating our true interests, and negotiating about them, we speak about something else. For example: "It is good if a man must pay child support for a child that is not biologically his, because such policy is good for children." (Instead of admitting openly that such policy allows a woman to increase her utility function, because she does not have to compromise in her choice of partner between his attractiveness and responsibility, and can maximize for attractiveness instead.) On the other hand, forbidding women access to higher education could also be framed as good for children... except that this kind of re-framing was already thoroughly exposed by feminists.
It is difficult to propose a policy of "I will cooperate in Prisonners' Dillemma if and only if you will cooperate", if in the first place you are not allowed to admit that the conflict exists, and if speaking about the payoff matrices is such strong taboo that many people even don't know them.
So instead we randomly optimize for children in some places, and against children in other places, pretending that this is all done around the adult-child axis, and completely unrelated to man-woman axis. (It's adults who have a right for complete freedom of their bodies and everything that happens to be inside; and it's children who have a right for income proportional to their biological father's income. See, this is almost completely gender neutral! But if you try to suggest that instead the children should have a right to live, and adults should have a right for financial freedom, it is culturally allowed to expose how sexist your suggestions are.)
Er... How so? I can't see any reason why I'd rather my mother was less educated than she actually is.