Rationality Considered Harmful (In Politics)

This post is already getting too long so I deleted the section on lessons to be learned, but if there is interest I'll do a followup. Let me know what you think in the comments!

I at least would be interested in hearing anything else that you have to say about this topic. I'm not averse to private conversation on the matter either; most such conversations of mine are private.

Hypothesis: Fiction silently allows people to switch into truthseeking mode about politics.

A history student friend of mine was playing Fallout: New Vegas, and he wanted to talk to me about which ending he should choose for the game's narrative. The conversation was mostly optimized for entertaining one another, but I found that this was a situation where I could slip in my real opinions on politics without getting wide-eyed stares! Like this one:

The question you have to ask yourself is "Do I value democracy because it is a good system, or do I value democracy per se?" A lot of people will admit that they value democracy per se. But that seems wrong to me. That means that if someone showed you a better system that you could verify was better, you would say "This is good governance, but the purpose of government is not good governance, the purpose of government is democracy." (I do, however, understand democracy as a 'current best bet' or 'local maximum'.)

I have in fact gotten wide-eyed stares for saying things like that, even granting the final pragmatic injunction on democracy as local maximum. I find that weird, because it seems like one of the first steps you would take towards thinking about politics clearly, not even as cognitive work but for the sake of avoiding cognitive anti-work, to not equivocate democracy with good governance. If you were further in the past and the fashionable political system were not democracy but monarchy, and you, like many others, consider democracy preferable to monarchy, then upon a future human revealing to you the notion of a modern democracy, you would find yourself saying, regrettably, "This is good governance, but the purpose of government is not good governance, the purpose of government is monarchy."

But because we were arguing for fictional governments, I seemed to be sending an imperceptibly weak signal that I would defect in a real tossup between democracy and something else, and thus my conversation partner could entertain my opinion whilst looking through truthseeking goggles instead of political ones.

The student is one of two people with whom I've had this precise conversation, and I do mean in the particular sense of "Which Fallout ending do I pick?" I slipped this opinion into both, and both came back weeks later to tell me that they spent a lot of time thinking about that particular part of the conversation and that the opinion I shared seemed deep. If Eliezer's hypothesis about the origin of feelings of deepness is true, then this is because they were actually truthseeking when they evaluated my opinion, and the opinion really got rid of a real cached thought: "Democracy is a priori unassailable."

In the spirit of doing accidentally effective things deliberately, if you ever wanted to flip someone's truthseeking switch, you might do it by placing the debate within the context of a fictional universe.

Not to be pedantic, but it was irrational for Aaronson to open his mouth about Feminism; Harris' approach may be rational given his stated aims, but his surprise at the reaction of his opponents is not rational; and talking about identitarian-adjacent topics like genetic modification without first carefully preparing the ground for discussion is going to risky.

(Unfortunately) the actual rationalist-who-wins is the one who goes about his ambitions like a good Slytherin and never publicly states his beliefs.

Most of my friends can immediately smell when a writer using a truth-oriented approach to politics has a strong hidden agenda, and will respond much differently than they would to truth-oriented writers with weaker agendas. Some of them would even say that, conditional on you having an agenda, it's dishonest to note that you believe that you're using a truth-oriented approach; in this case, claiming that you're using a truth-oriented approach reads as an attempt to hide the fact that you have an agenda. This holds regardless of whether your argument is correct, or whether you have good intentions.

There's a wide existing literature on concepts which are related to (but don't directly address) how to best engage in truth seeking on politically charged topics.The books titled Nonviolent Communication, HtWFaIP, and Impro, are all non-obvious examples. I posit that promoting this literature might be one of the best uses of our time, if our strongest desire is to make political discourse more truth-oriented.

One central theme to all of these works is that putting effort into being agreeable and listening to your discussion partners will make them more receptive to evaluating your own claims based on how factual they are. I'm likely to condense most of the relevant insights into a couple posts once I'm in an emotional state amenable to doing so.

One problem I have with communicating this is that I was only able to pick up on it after lots of academic studying (degree doesn't matter so much as having read and understood the growth of Social Science knowledge and research), and reading blogs of academics who have run into trouble for years.

Whether it's InfoProc on genetic engineering, West Hunter on evolution, SSC on feminism, and so forth.

By time you read all this stuff and it starts coming together in your head, you realize you can't rationally discuss it with other people. If I'm at a party and someone mentions they are a feminist, I'm definitely not going to mention I'm an anti-feminist (or try to explain why I think the entire idea of flippant 'ism identification' is broken). Or even outside a party, it's a heavy discussion to bring up for no real gain.

There is no nice starting position, or clear argument on why rationality is often harmful in politics without contemporary and historical examples. It takes hours of conversations with close friends who are willing to have their mind changed, simply to explain that there is this entire world that no one is allowed to discuss. I have friends who get so frustrated by this, they decide to go full Alt-Right or Neoreaction, which I think is also a mistake.

One nice place to start though is in the past, where the institutions that many people view today as the most rational and truthful were completely wrong. That can at lease plant a seed of doubt. This interview with 20th century journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who traveled through the Soviet Union during the Holodomor, is one of my favorites: (http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1983/228321.shtml)

Shortly before Mr. Muggeridge's articles appeared in the Guardian, the Soviet authorities declared Ukraine out of bounds to reporters and set about concealing the destruction they had wreaked. Prominent statesmen, writers and journalists - among them French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty of The New York Times - were enlisted in the campaign of misinformation.

Or point to guys like Walter Duranty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty).

The problem though is unlike lots of EY-Rationality-Facts, you can't learn why rationality is often harmful in politics without loads of examples throughout time. And unlike cognitive biases, it's really hard to shortly explain.

The fact that you are opposed with straw-manning and tribal shaming doesn't imply that you are engaging in truth seeking, as you seem to suggest.

Truth seeking is not done by exposing an opinion, it's done by confronting with people who disagree but can explain why, and you both engage in exploring your priors, collecting and evaluating evidence, etc.
It is to be expected that when you send your opinion in the wild, you will be met with both angry blind reactions and calm considered ones. Hopefully you will engage with the interesting ones and ignore the rest.

What I see in your post is that you don't want any negative reaction when you expose an unpopular opinion, because it would be truth-seeking to expose an unpopular opinion without any hidden agenda. But that is not enough: is how you respond to argumentative critics that qualify you as truth seeker.
In an ideal world all kind of discussions would be of the rational kind, but there's a reason rationality must be made up of walled gardens.

That's why I reject your thesis: those three examples were not exemplifying paragon rational behavior, and it is not actively harmful to discuss rationally of politics, unless you have a very fragile online reputation.

Really not a fan of the title; my objection is basically the same as moridinamael's. The thing you're pointing out as a mistake is not rationality but a particular bad move in a social game, namely stating certain kinds of unpopular opinions.

One possible steelman of the point I think you're making can be found in Paul Christiano's If we can't lie to others, we will lie to ourselves. In any case, the way I get around this is not engaging even slightly publicly in conversations where I might even have an opportunity to state my least popular opinions.

Rationality in politics might be harmful for you as an individual, but vital to humans collectively. Spreading the attitude "rationality is harmful in politics" could be very bad. Politics is too important to cede to the emotionalists.

FYI: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ofi/rational_politics_project/