Object-level harms to the discourse from using political examples. It’s both harder for people to discuss politics, and harder for them to agree on the right abstractions. If you discuss the abstractions directly, you can avoid those issues.
I don’t quite follow what this is trying to say. It’s harder to talk about politics if you use political examples?
As a general rule, if you want to communicate clearly, it’s better to give examples than to only use abstractions. I can understand an argument that it’s undesirable to talk about politics except in very abstract terms, because it will tend to interfere with other discussions. But I’m confused by the apparent claim that even if you want to talk about politics itself, using examples is bad.
(If that even is what the quoted bit is trying to say. I’m having trouble parsing its sentences.)
Suppose I want to talk about how ideological factions often align themselves on epistemic grounds instead of moral grounds. To give an example, I talk about how you might expect factions to be the “prefers strawberry” faction and the “prefers vanilla” faction, but in fact when you look at the world the faction membership tests are “thinks vanilla causes cancer” and “thinks vanilla doesn’t cause cancer.” And perhaps the actual cause is upstream, and is closer to “doesn’t trust agribusiness-funded research” vs. “does trust agribusiness-funded research.”
I could have instead given the example that had me actually thinking about ideological factions, and how much they are based on epistemic grounds vs. moral grounds. But likely the discussion then would be about the object-level point, of which faction is more correct, or perhaps even about which faction can consider LW part of its territory, independent of which is correct.
When Eliezer talked about this, in Belief as Attire, he used a real example, although one that was not quite contemporary at the time, and was called out for it in the comments.
And if your goal is to figure out whether LW is territory for faction A or faction B, this rule is here to say: Don’t.
Ah, I see what you mean. This kind of discussion is not what comes to mind from the phrase “discuss politics”, though. I think that was the source of confusion.
If the goal is to discuss abstract patterns that come up in politics (vs what I would think of as “discussing politics”, namely discussions about politicians and policies and elections, etc), then I agree the non-loaded, made up examples are better.
I think this is a bad compromise. If the motivating example is political, your abstraction will either bring it in by association, or be far less compelling to discuss. Just keep politics off the site, and that includes abstractions whose best examples are political.
If it’s a more general abstraction, it’ll be easy to find better examples.
I don’t quite follow what this is trying to say. It’s harder to talk about politics if you use political examples?
As a general rule, if you want to communicate clearly, it’s better to give examples than to only use abstractions. I can understand an argument that it’s undesirable to talk about politics except in very abstract terms, because it will tend to interfere with other discussions. But I’m confused by the apparent claim that even if you want to talk about politics itself, using examples is bad.
(If that even is what the quoted bit is trying to say. I’m having trouble parsing its sentences.)
Suppose I want to talk about how ideological factions often align themselves on epistemic grounds instead of moral grounds. To give an example, I talk about how you might expect factions to be the “prefers strawberry” faction and the “prefers vanilla” faction, but in fact when you look at the world the faction membership tests are “thinks vanilla causes cancer” and “thinks vanilla doesn’t cause cancer.” And perhaps the actual cause is upstream, and is closer to “doesn’t trust agribusiness-funded research” vs. “does trust agribusiness-funded research.”
I could have instead given the example that had me actually thinking about ideological factions, and how much they are based on epistemic grounds vs. moral grounds. But likely the discussion then would be about the object-level point, of which faction is more correct, or perhaps even about which faction can consider LW part of its territory, independent of which is correct.
When Eliezer talked about this, in Belief as Attire, he used a real example, although one that was not quite contemporary at the time, and was called out for it in the comments.
And if your goal is to figure out whether LW is territory for faction A or faction B, this rule is here to say: Don’t.
Ah, I see what you mean. This kind of discussion is not what comes to mind from the phrase “discuss politics”, though. I think that was the source of confusion.
If the goal is to discuss abstract patterns that come up in politics (vs what I would think of as “discussing politics”, namely discussions about politicians and policies and elections, etc), then I agree the non-loaded, made up examples are better.
I think this is a bad compromise. If the motivating example is political, your abstraction will either bring it in by association, or be far less compelling to discuss. Just keep politics off the site, and that includes abstractions whose best examples are political.
If it’s a more general abstraction, it’ll be easy to find better examples.