Many LW users are not from USA, but USA is probably the only country with enough LW users for a meaningful political action. So I guess we can assume that we are going to influence American politics (because we don’t have enough people in any other country), but in ways that most LW users would agree with, regardless of their country (because otherwise we couldn’t achieve cooperation on this website). This is not wrong, per se, just counter-intuitive, so I am saying it explicitly. (Majority of LW users would almost certainly include majority of American LW users.)
It could be interesting to find out whether there are political suggestions that, say, 95% of LW users would agree with. If people think directly about the usual party lines, that’s the wrong place for consensus. But there could be something which is not so important for either American party, and where a rational consensus could be found. (Robin Hanson calls it “pulling policy ropes sideways”.) If we can identify those issues, then perhaps we could try to fight for one of them, just as an experiment to see what we can achieve.
Many LW users are not from USA, but USA is probably the only country with enough LW users for a meaningful political action. So I guess we can assume that we are going to influence American politics (because we don’t have enough people in any other country), but in ways that most LW users would agree with, regardless of their country (because otherwise we couldn’t achieve cooperation on this website). This is not wrong, per se, just counter-intuitive, so I am saying it explicitly. (Majority of LW users would almost certainly include majority of American LW users.)
It could be interesting to find out whether there are political suggestions that, say, 95% of LW users would agree with. If people think directly about the usual party lines, that’s the wrong place for consensus. But there could be something which is not so important for either American party, and where a rational consensus could be found. (Robin Hanson calls it “pulling policy ropes sideways”.) If we can identify those issues, then perhaps we could try to fight for one of them, just as an experiment to see what we can achieve.