Listen. Strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords, is no basis for a system of government

I'm a political junkie with a strong amateur background in economics and professional background in game theory and evolution from POV of mathematics. I have a fairly good knowledge of politics in USA and Russia/USSR.

Politically speaking, I am first and foremost a pessimistic pragmatist with long-term goals. Meaning that:

1. I am for any policy that can be practically shown to (A) Work in practice, given human nature; and (B) Poses an ESS (Evolutionary stable strategy), meaning that it will work in long term without unforeseen negative side effects. I am against any policy that either discounts human nature (communism is a wonderful idea if you implement it with ants but fails miserably with primates); or has long term net negative side effects (prohibition and war on drugs have side effects whose negatives significantly exceed direct benefits).

2. I know that people are capable of being dumb, evil and self-serving, because we evolved that way - and therefore any time you allow a disproportionate amount of unchecked power to a position, someone will rise to that position to abuse that power in the worst possible way. A benevolent dictator will be replaced by malevolent one. As the classic put it, a government strong enough to give you everything is also strong enough to take it from you. I also know that people are shockingly bad at predicting complex systems and complicated 2d- and 3-d order effects of things, so I distrust anyone proposing major centrally planned solutions. They are invariably wrong, as proven over and over again by history.

The only way to convince me you are right as far as a political disagreement over policy or idea is to give me a good set of data proving me wrong, or a well thought out model showing a stable equilibrium and accounting for side effects.

In everyday practical terms, that makes me politically a libertarian (possibly classical liberal in original European meaning), philosophically a utilitarian, and votingly anti-big-government. I'm not right wing per se - for example I would easily choose to vote for a typical "blue dog" democrat over GWB, and pretty much anyone over Big Coke Bloomberg; and I think the state shouldn't marry people AT ALL, heterosexual or homosexual.

P.S. Both my profile age and gravatar are nods to my SciFi geek background (HHG2TG and Cryptonomicon) and not related to reality or politics.