“Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it’s a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational.”
“I’m not saying that I think we should be apolitical”
The main point of the post was to not shove politics where it’s unnecessary, because it can have all these bad effects. I expect Eliezer agrees far more with the idea that Politics is hard mode, than the idea that “we couldn’t expect our rationality skills to be as helpful in determining truth in politics”.
Maybe I should have spoken more precisely. He wasn’t telling individuals to be apolitical. It’s more that he didn’t think it was a good idea to center the rationalist community around it as it would interfere with the rationalist project. ie. That even with our community striving to improve our rationality that it’d still be beyond us to bring in discussions of politics without corrupting our epistemology.
So when I said “we couldn’t expect our rationality skills to be as helpful in determining truth in politics”, I was actually primarily talking about the process of a community attempting to converge on the truth rather than an individual.
He didn’t say anything like that in Politics is the Mind-Killer, quite the contrary:
The main point of the post was to not shove politics where it’s unnecessary, because it can have all these bad effects. I expect Eliezer agrees far more with the idea that Politics is hard mode, than the idea that “we couldn’t expect our rationality skills to be as helpful in determining truth in politics”.
Thanks for sharing.
Maybe I should have spoken more precisely. He wasn’t telling individuals to be apolitical. It’s more that he didn’t think it was a good idea to center the rationalist community around it as it would interfere with the rationalist project. ie. That even with our community striving to improve our rationality that it’d still be beyond us to bring in discussions of politics without corrupting our epistemology.
So when I said “we couldn’t expect our rationality skills to be as helpful in determining truth in politics”, I was actually primarily talking about the process of a community attempting to converge on the truth rather than an individual.