Can we dodge the mindkiller?

Political instrumental rationality would be about figuring out and taking the political actions that would cause particular goals to happen. Most of this turns out to be telling people compelling things that you know that they don't happen to, and convincing different groups that their interests align (or can align in a particular interest) when it's not obvious that they do.

Political actions are based on appeals to identity, group membership, group bounding, group interests, individual interests, and different political ideas in order to get people to shift allegiances and take action toward a particular goal.

For any given individual, the relative importance of these factors will vary. For questions of identity and affiliation, they will weigh those factors based on meaning being reinforced, and memory-related stuff (i.e. clear memories of meaningful experiences count, but so do not-particularly meaningful but happens every day stuff). For actual action, it will be based on various psychological factors, as well as simply options being available and salient while they have the opportunity to act in a way that reinforces their affiliations/meaning/standing with others in the group/personal interests.

As a result, political instrumental rationality is going to be incredibly contingent on local circumstances -- who talks to who, who believes what how strongly, who's reliable, who controls what, who wants what, who hears about what, etc.

A more object level example takes place in The Wire, when a pastor is setting up various public service programs in an area where drug dealing is effectively legalized.

The pastor himself is able to appeal to his community on the basis of religious solidarity in order to get money, and so he can fund some stuff. He cares about public health and the fate of the now unemployed would-be drug runners who are no longer necessary for drug dealing because of Christian reasons (since drugs are legal, the gang members don't bother with various steps that ensure that none of them can be photographed handing someone drugs for money -- the dealer gets the money then the runner (typically a child) goes to the stash to give the buyer drugs). Further, he knows people from various community/political events in Baltimore.

So far, so good. He controls some resources (money), has a goal (public health, child development), and knows some people.

One of the first people he talks to is a doctor who has been trying to do STD prevention for a while, but hasn't had the funding or organizational capacity to do much of anything. The pastor points out to him that there are a lot of at-risk people who are now concentrated in a particular location so that the logistics of getting services to people is much simpler. In this case, the pastor simply had information (through his connections) that the doctor didn't, and got the doctor to cooperate by pointing out the opportunity to do something that the doctor had wanted.

He gets the support of the police district chief who decided to selectively enforce drug laws by appealing to the police chief's desire for improving the district under his command (he was initially trying to shift drug trafficking away from more populated areas, and decrease violence by decreasing competition over territory), and it more or less worked.

That being said, I have more or less no idea what kinds of large-scale political action ought to be possible/is desirable.

I totally have the intuition though that step one of any plan is to become personally acquainted with people who have some sort of influence over the areas that you're interested in, or to build influence by getting people who have some control over what you're interested in to pay more attention to you. Borderline, if you can't name names, and can't point at groups of people involved in the action, then you can't do anything particularly useful politically.

what does political instrumental rationality look like?

Optimizing for maximum mindkilling (in your preferred direction)?

I might be stating the obvious, but: to find out what political instrumental rationality looks like, look closely at politically instrumentally rational people & organizations. That is, find those who accomplished major political goals, and study what they did to fulfil those goals. This may be a less biased (and easier?) approach than speculating with other laypeople.

I said "a wide range of the political spectrum" rather than "the whole political spectrum" because I'm not expecting to pull everyone in.

I don't know know enough about reactionaries to say whether there's any overlap between their point of view and mine.

Other areas I would suggest: IP reform,

Different people will have different opinion on the issue. Some want a abolishment of patents while others don't.

tax code simplicity,

That's a very difficult topic. There are a lot of people who pretend to want tax code simplicity but at the same time do favor specific tax deductions.

science curricula

I would guess that there are a fair number of people who oppose the idea of curricula.

corporate subsidies.

It's very difficult to outmatch a corporation who lobbies for their own subsidies.

Other areas I would suggest: IP reform, tax code simplicity, science curricula and corporate subsidies. Really, there are tons of things progressives, neoliberals, leftists and libertarians can cooperate on.

Wait I'm confused, are they for or against those things?

At least one failure mode is avoided if "political identity" is a mere descriptive classification of the aggregate of actual beliefs, but these beliefs aren't formed based on the opaque political identity label. Ensuring accuracy in these beliefs is a more ambitious goal than just avoiding this common fallacy.

I expect government to introduce bureaucracy and pervert good ideas, but I expect private companies to come with good ideas if given proper financial incentives... and someone else expects government to act in the interest of powerless opressed masses, and expects rich and powerful individuals to destroy everything for their own profit

In other words, you're a thoughtful individual with deep and rational reasons for believing what you believe... while those silly people are naive, impractical and narrow-minded, with an unrealistic and one-sided view of the world?

Nice.

20% of Americans think the war on drugs is worth the costs. How many states just passed referenda legalizing marijuana use? This is not a fringe position.

I'm having a hard time finding polling on the justice system as a whole, but the supremes are around 40/40 split on approval/disapproval.

People who have genuinely thought through all of their political beliefs generally have few (solid) political beliefs.

Personally I think those who think politics are a mindkiller are just guilty of a jilted hubris; it's easier to claim other people can't change their minds than to accept that your arguments aren't as universally compelling as you thought.

I can't speak for everyone here, but I've had the experience of partially deconverting myself from a certain political philosophy, which was extremely... well, difficult is the wrong word, it usually didn't take much effort or willpower or courage, but it did involve unwinding a tremendous amount of rationalization and defensiveness. I'm not trying to claim perfection now, either, but ever since then I've found it useful to remember how dogmatism feels from the inside when I'm feeling defensive about one of my current beliefs or when I'm tempted to try to convert someone else.

And that seems to generalize fairly well. "Politics is the mind-killer" doesn't just mean everyone else's politics. It means that your thinking on anything you have an identity stake in is automatically suspect, and that you'd better be damned careful if you want to make major decisions based on it. This does imply as a corollary that partisan (or otherwise identity-bound) discussions on the Internet are spectacularly unlikely to be productive, but "my politics are perfectly rational, it's all the fault of those guys over there" is exactly the wrong message to be taking from it.

In my experience it seems that people choose their political identity based on a few beliefs that are important to them and pick up the rest as part of the identity package.

Those are both things I see strong libertarian support for and little support outside the libertarian sphere.

I don't think that's true at all; I would say that most liberals right now, and much of the country in general, are in favor of at least some movement on both of those issues. Legalization of marijuana, for example, now has majority support according to recent polls.

How can one tell if one has thought through their political beliefs? One piece of evidence might be that those beliefs have changed, significantly, from the beliefs you inherited from your parents and ealry environment. Even more so if you can say, because I learned facts X, Y, and Z, this changed my political beliefs.

At the same time, be careful not to confuse beliefs about fact with beliefs about values. I still have much the same political values I had 30 years ago. However I have very different political beliefs than I did then, primarily as a result of learning certain facts about 20th century history.

This isn't unprecedented, though that post had a (quite facetious) disclaimer.

Downside: Advocating intentionally breaking the law would bring negative attention to the community, and in severe cases could bring legislative action against important members of the community. This would be less of problem for the meatspace community (Meetups and such) since everything they do isn't posted online.

So basically you're advocating cooperating among LWers to engage in defection against other groups.

Alternative vote is Instant Runoff Voting, right? If so, then it's bad, for it fails the monotonicity criterion. That means that raising one's vote re a particular candidate doesn't necessarally do the obvious thing.

Personally, I favor Approval Voting, since it seems to be the simplest possible change to our voting system that would still produce large gains.

(Also, would be nice if we (the US, that is) could switch to algorithmic redistricting and completely get rid of the whole gerrymandering nonsense.)

1) better, more consistent evidence for policies (good stats rather than govts commissioning policy-based evidence)

Although when the stakes are sufficiently high (as they often are in politics) this tends to degenerate to people finding ways to bride, intimidate, or otherwise manipulate whoever is gathering and/or analyzing said evidence.

I'd push for finding a way to make rehabilitation cheaper and more effective, rather than focusing on imprisonment/fines, with regards the more addictive drugs (I don't think of myself as much of a family person, but my father is the only branch of his family not destroyed by drug abuse; even the one almost-rational one cannot find a stable place to stay that is not filled with crackheads, so she stays in trouble even though she has wanted out of it since the beginning. Long story in which I missed a perfect opportunity to save the day.). The trends that marijuana are currently following in the US seem to indicate that most people consider it relatively safe if used as prescribed (For the above reasons, my father's branch of the family--which is basically the household I live in--has an overwhelmingly negative view on recreational drugs categorically, but my sister still helped with the petition to get medicinal marijuana on the ballot in our state). The above-mentioned addict did once manage to out instrumentally rational my dad while high (he'd spent a lot of time, effort and chemicals scrubbing what she discovered to be the shadow of a fan ornament. Hilarity ensued.); I have no idea what she had been using, but that and other evidence points toward pot (she was putting more effort than usual into staying out of trouble around that time, for parenthood-related reasons).

In this particular case, I suspect what got her jailtime was stealing someone's wallet and using his checks/credits, which I'm quite certain (1.0-epsilon) was for drug money. The legal implications, here, are that any rehabilitation services would need to be applicable to crimes commonly influenced by addictive substances, if said substances can be reasonably considered a contributing factor. (I might have managed to get into my own place this time last year had a completely unrelated addict not ransacked the place while it was being repaired. He had just gotten out of prison, and now owes restitution that I have no expectation of ever getting. I also expect that the afore-mentioned cousin might have been able to reduce the need for repairs had she been staying there while I was at college, but crack/heroine-related conflicts prevented that. )

TL;DR: I think Marijuana's doing pretty well in the US. Perhaps a more constructive and less punitive approach to reducing the harm from harder drugs would be worth pursuing? The cousin I mentioned strikes me as being capable enough to improve her socioeconomic status enormously if she could find a non-addict peer group. Beyond most of the rest of the family (who dabble in meth and pot but mostly just overdo cigarettes and alcohol to the point of serious health risk. Except my grandfather, whose health baffles doctors and is predicted to possibly reach 100. That would put him in the 2030s, though there's this morbid family tradition where the patriarch hangs himself at some point past 80 on a whim. But I digress.).

Rationalists might be likely to agree that more research to improve forensics would be a good idea, and likewise for handling witnesses' memories with care. For example, you get better results if you show a witness possible suspects one at a time rather than all at once in a lineup. In the latter case, people are likely to choose the person who most resembles the criminal rather than admitting that none of them are an excellent match for what the witness remembers.