say this is a de­ci­sion the­ory prob­lem and that the “shoot­ing one­self in the foot” metaphor is choos­ing the wrong coun­ter­fac­tual. Rather, we should think of the peo­ple bas­tardiz­ing and abus­ing con­cepts as the ones shoot­ing us in the feet!

You still end up with a shot foot. People tend to confuse solving problems with apportioning blame -- I call it the "guns don't kill people" fallacy.

You shouldn't do this in C.

I was being a bit tongue in cheek about the macro thing. You can apply macros, in the sense of a preprocessor expanding text, to anything.

Defmacro isn't unique,but not just because of preprocessors. Less vaunted languages such as Forth can also define fundamental new keywords.

The uniqueness claim, apart from being false, is an unnecessary restriction. There are ways of achieving the things that lisp can achieve that dont have its downsides.

You're right, I'm rusty.

For example, Python’s if and not are macros. You can’t write your own ifnot macro to abbreviate if and not because you’re not allowed to write your own macros.

Here's how you do it with the C preprocessor.

#define ifnot(x) if(!x)

You can apply this trick to any language with a textual representation, since preprocessing is a separate stage.

So lots of people are taking up LISP, and abandoning it as soon as they hit the dreaded defmacro? But are lots of people aren't taking up LISP. There are lot of reasons for not studying old, little-used languages. And it's not as if programmers are low-openness people who hate fundamentally new paradigms -- OO would never have spread if they were. For me, LISP pattern matches to "cult following" rather than "great thing that the sheeple can't understand".

I’ll hazard a guess: they are things whose merits seem clear to lsusr but that are widely neglected by others. I suggest, though, that this characteristic doesn’t pick out something special about those things. People are just really bad at seeing the merits of things they aren’t already in favour of.

There's a flipside to that where people can get super enthusiastic about things they are in favour of. In other words, while it is possible for people to ignore the merits of things that aren't widely known, it's possible for people to imagine the merits of minority-interest things that maybe aren't all that good. Things that have a cult following, like Austrian economics, Modern Monetary theory, Objectivism, general semantics...

Whether solving politics is reasonable depends on where you are coming from. There's a common assumption round here that Aumann's agreement applies to real life, that people should be able to reach agreement and solve problems, and if they can't, that's an anomaly that needs explanation. The OP is suggesting that the explanation for arch-rationalists such as Hanson and Yudkowsky being unable to agree is lack of skill,whereas I am suggesting that Aumanns theorem doesn't apply to real life, so lack of skill is not the only problem.

Did he solve politics? Certainly some people are better debaters than others, but that doesn't mean that the absolute standard of being able to resolve fundamental disputes is ever reached.