Speculative Evopsych, Ep. 1

Ecosystems, and organisms in them, generally don't care about stuff that can't be turned into power-within-the-ecosystem. Box two exists, but unless the members of box one can utilize box two for e.g. information/computation/communication, it doesn't matter to anyone in box one.

Other places where this applies:

• Highly competitive industries won't care about externalities or the long-term future. Externalities and the future are in box two. They might not even be modeled.
• Young people have a personal interest in making their life better when they're older, but under sufficient competitive pressure (e.g. in competitive workplaces, or in status-based social groups), won't do so. Nursing homes are box two.
• People playing power games at a high level (e.g. in politics) will have a hard time caring about anything not directly relevant to the power game. Most of the actual effects are, from the perspective of the power game, in box two; those effects that actually are directly relevant get modeled as part of the power game itself, i.e. box one. Signing a bill is not about the policy effects, it's about signalling, because the policy effects only affect the power game on a pretty long timescale (and likely won't even be modeled from within the power game), and signalling affects it immediately.

(These examples are somewhat worse for making the point because the case is much more clear in the case of evolution; humans are sometimes rational agents that act non-ecologically)

The point is really analytically simple, it doesn't require steelmanning to understand, you can just read the post. You don't need to use the outside view for arguments like this, you can just spend a small amount of effort trying to understand it (argument screens off authority [LW · GW]). It isn't even arguing positively for the existence of the afterlife, it's at most arguing against one particularly weak argument against it.

Contrast this with, say, the ontological argument, which is not analytically simple, has obvious problems/counterexamples, and might be worth understanding more deeply, but likely isn't worth the effort since (from an atheistic perspective) it's likely on priors to be made in bad faith based on a motivated confusion.

In general if "politics is the mindkiller" is preventing you from considering all analytical arguments that you interpret as being on a particular side of a political issue, then "politics is the mindkiller" is likely mindkilling you more than politics itself. (My impression was that religion wasn't even a significant political issue around here, since opinion is so near-unanimously against its literal truth...)

I don't see a different example that makes the point as strongly and clearly, do you see one?