What would a good article on Bayesian liberty look like?

Is that really your analysis of human society from the ground up

Not quite from the ground up; the version that /does/ start from the ground up is summarized in http://www.datapacrat.com/sketches/Rational01ink.jpg and http://www.datapacrat.com/sketches/Rational02ink.jpg .

The question you should be asking yourself is not "what justifies my package of political beliefs," but "what do I think people really want out of society, and how do I optimize for that?"

How about, "What do I think /I/ want out of society, and how do I optimize for that?"?

Why is survival one of your goals ("I want it." is an acceptable answer, but you have to accept that you might only want it due to being misinformed; even if it is probably correct, it it extremely unlikely that all your desires would be retained in your reflective equilibrium.)? Is it your only goal? Why?

At the moment, my primary goal is the continued existence of sapience. Partly it is due to the fact that since purpose and meaning aren't inherent qualities of anything, but are projected onto things by sapient minds, and I want my existence to have had some meaning, then in order to do that, sapients have to continue to exist. Or, put another way, for just about /any/ goal I can seriously imagine myself wanting, the continued existence of sapience is a necessary prerequisite.

If survival infringes on your other desires it becomes counterproductive. Beware lost purposes. Even if this doesn't hold, maximizing your probability of survival is not the same as maximizing whatever you actually prefer to maximize. If you only focus on survival, you risk giving up everything (or everything else if you value survival in itself - I don't think I do, but I'm very uncertain) for a slightly increased lifespan.

If I seriously come to the conclusion that my continued life has a measurable impact that /reduces/ the probability that sapience will continue to exist in the universe... then I honestly don't know whether I'd choose personal death. For example, one of the goals I've imagined myself working for is "Life forever or die trying", which, as usual, requires at least some sapience in the universe (if only myself), but... well, it's a problem I hope never to have to encounter... and, fortunately, at present, I'm trying to use my existence to /increase/ the probability that sapience will continue to exist, so it's unlikely I'll never encounter that particular problem.

"Use gender-neutral language" is motivated by an egalitarian instinct, and is said by (moral) authorities - both are things libertarians don't seem very fond of.

(I don't identify very strongly as a libertarian, but can relate to the kneejerk reflex against being told what to do)

Also, some people might not phrase it as "people started realizing why that was a bad idea" but rather as "sanctimonious politically correct busybodies started telling everybody how to speak resulting in some horrible eyesores like he/she or ey all over the place". I don't really buy the second version , but I don't think the first one is a fair description either (though it's hard to judge from a French point of view, gender and grammar work a bit differently in French).

I suspect that it is due to emotional reactions against feeling like one is being told what to do. I don't know what the correlation v. causation is in what comes first (the philosophical attitude leading to such emotional reactions or the emotional attitude making one more likely to accept a libertarian philosophical viewpoint). But given such an emotional reaction, one can easily see people going out of their way to avoid using the terminology that they might feel like they are being told to use.

That's a good question - though I'm not sure I can think of a good answer.

I know that, in most of my writing, I tend to use 'they' as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun... when I wrote 'Man is a rational animal, etc', I was aware that I could have rephrased the whole thing to be gender-neutral... but when writing, I felt that it wouldn't have provided the same feeling - short, sharp, direct, to-the-point. The capitalized term 'Man' is, for good or ill, shorter than the word 'humanity', and "Man is a rational animal" has a different sense about it than (I wanted to insert 'the mealy-mouthed' here, which isn't a term I remember actually having used) "humans are rational creatures".

There's probably something Dark-Artish in there somewhere, though it wasn't a conscious invocation thereof.

I'd guess it's the gender split. It's a doozy.

I think you'd see less gendered in libertarian journalism, where there are more women.