I don’t have a clear sense of a good choice here, but for frame of reference (note: this is me using the current site rules as examples of how some human tendencies work and what tradeoffs we’ve currently made, not speaking as developer of the site and not speaking for what sorts of conversation are “Good™”. Just thinking out loud)
Humans are demonstratably bad at talking about politics. If you allow them to do so on your website, it’ll quickly attract the sort of person who turns it into bad facebook comments unless you have a lot of effortful moderation and careful karma policies.
At the same time, it’s very good for seasoned Less Wrong folk to be able to have nuanced conversations about politics that make useful headway on things. And should be able to do so without contorting themselves in circles.
This is a case where an explicit call was made: mainstream politics is banned from Less Wrong main page. You can talk about it on the personal page but it’s somewhat hidden away from people that aren’t going looking for it.
For similar reasons, the Front Page of Less Wrong is now declared “not a place for calls to action”, because Calls To Action end up impacting social reality and social reality is Hard Mode.
I think the set of people I’d trust to talk about being more-or-less human is roughly the same set of people I’d trust to talk about politics productively (for approximately the same reason). I think no matter how much we level up at rational-discourse, the most public-facing areas in the site are going to have newcomers who haven’t leveled up at discussing nuanced things carefully.
None of that is meant to output a particular policy suggestion—the point is that this sort of consideration is the type of thing we’ve already run into and made some tradeoffs on.
I don’t have a clear sense of a good choice here, but for frame of reference (note: this is me using the current site rules as examples of how some human tendencies work and what tradeoffs we’ve currently made, not speaking as developer of the site and not speaking for what sorts of conversation are “Good™”. Just thinking out loud)
Humans are demonstratably bad at talking about politics. If you allow them to do so on your website, it’ll quickly attract the sort of person who turns it into bad facebook comments unless you have a lot of effortful moderation and careful karma policies.
At the same time, it’s very good for seasoned Less Wrong folk to be able to have nuanced conversations about politics that make useful headway on things. And should be able to do so without contorting themselves in circles.
This is a case where an explicit call was made: mainstream politics is banned from Less Wrong main page. You can talk about it on the personal page but it’s somewhat hidden away from people that aren’t going looking for it.
For similar reasons, the Front Page of Less Wrong is now declared “not a place for calls to action”, because Calls To Action end up impacting social reality and social reality is Hard Mode.
I think the set of people I’d trust to talk about being more-or-less human is roughly the same set of people I’d trust to talk about politics productively (for approximately the same reason). I think no matter how much we level up at rational-discourse, the most public-facing areas in the site are going to have newcomers who haven’t leveled up at discussing nuanced things carefully.
None of that is meant to output a particular policy suggestion—the point is that this sort of consideration is the type of thing we’ve already run into and made some tradeoffs on.