Won’t the goal of getting humans to reason better necessarily turn political at a certain point?
Trivially, yes. Among other things, we would like politicians to reason better, and for everyone to profit thereby.
I’m not here very frequently, I just really like political theory and have seen around the site that you guys try to not discuss it too much.
As it happens, this significantly predates the current political environment. Minimizing talking about politics, in the American political party horse-race sense, is one of our foundational taboos. It is not so strong anymore—once even a relevant keyword without appropriate caveats would pile on downvotes and excoriation in the comments—but for your historical interest the relevant essay is Politics Is The Mind-Killer. You can search that phrase, or similar ones like “mind-killed” or “arguments are soldiers” to get a sense of how it went. The basic idea was that while we are all new at this rationality business, we should try to avoid talking about things that are especially irrational.
Of course at the same time the website was big on atheism, which is an irony we eventually recognized and corrected. The anti-politics taboo softened enough to allow talking about theory, and mechanisms, and even non-flashpoint policy (see the AI regulation posts). We also added things like arguing about whether or not god exists to the taboo list. There was a bunch of other developments too, but that’s the directional gist.
Happily for you and me both, political theory tackled well as theory finds a good reception here. As an example I submit A voting theory primer for rationalists and the follow-up posts by Jameson Quinn. All of these are on the subject of theories of voting, including discussing some real life examples of orgs and campaigns on the subject, and the whole thing is one of my favorite chunks of writing on the site.
Trivially, yes. Among other things, we would like politicians to reason better, and for everyone to profit thereby.
As it happens, this significantly predates the current political environment. Minimizing talking about politics, in the American political party horse-race sense, is one of our foundational taboos. It is not so strong anymore—once even a relevant keyword without appropriate caveats would pile on downvotes and excoriation in the comments—but for your historical interest the relevant essay is Politics Is The Mind-Killer. You can search that phrase, or similar ones like “mind-killed” or “arguments are soldiers” to get a sense of how it went. The basic idea was that while we are all new at this rationality business, we should try to avoid talking about things that are especially irrational.
Of course at the same time the website was big on atheism, which is an irony we eventually recognized and corrected. The anti-politics taboo softened enough to allow talking about theory, and mechanisms, and even non-flashpoint policy (see the AI regulation posts). We also added things like arguing about whether or not god exists to the taboo list. There was a bunch of other developments too, but that’s the directional gist.
Happily for you and me both, political theory tackled well as theory finds a good reception here. As an example I submit A voting theory primer for rationalists and the follow-up posts by Jameson Quinn. All of these are on the subject of theories of voting, including discussing some real life examples of orgs and campaigns on the subject, and the whole thing is one of my favorite chunks of writing on the site.