I voted Yes, but only if a community norm emerges that any discussion on any part of LW that becomes political (by which I include not just electoral politics, but also and especially topics like sexism, racism, privilege, political correctness, genetic differences in intelligence, etc.) is moved to the latest political thread. The idea is to have a “walled garden inside the walled garden” so that people who want LW to be a nominally politics-free environment can still approximate that experience, while does who don’t get to discuss these topics in the specific threads for them, and only there.
Another way to achieve a similar effect is to post about electoral politics, sexism, racism, privilege, political correctness, genetic differences in intelligence, and similar “political” issues (by which I mean here issues with such pervasive partisan associations that we expect discussions of them to become subject to the failure modes created by such associations) on our own blogs*, and include links to those discussions on LW where we think they are of general interest to the LW community.
That way, LW members who want to discuss (some or all of) these topics in a way that doesn’t spill over into the larger LW forum can do so without bothering anyone else.
* Where “blogs” here means, more broadly, any conversation-hosting forum, including anonymous ones created for the purpose if we want.
One problem with that suggestion is that these discussions often arise organically in a LW thread ostensibly dedicated to another topic, and they may arise between people who don’t have other blogs or natural places to take the conversation when it arises.
In fact, having posts with “(Politics)” in the title might allow people to avoid it better, because it might make politics come up less often in other threads.
My initial idea was a (weekly?) politics open thread, to make it as easy as possible to avoid politics threads / prevent risk of /discussion getting swamped by [politics]-tagged threads, but given the criticisms that have been raised of the karma system already, it’s probably best to keep it offsite. There’s already a network of rationality blogs; maybe lw-politics could be split off as a group blog? That might make it too difficult for people to start topics, though—so your idea is probably best. Possibly have a separate lw-politics feed / link aggregator that relevant posts could be submitted to, so they don’t get missed by people who would be interested and people don’t have to maintain their own RSS feeds to catch all the relevant posts.
include links to those discussions on LW where we think they are of general interest to the LW community.
If such linking becomes common, I would appreciate an explicit request to “please have substantive discussion over there, not here.” This also avoids the problem of a conversation being fragmented across two discussion sites.
I voted Yes, but only if a community norm emerges that any discussion on any part of LW that becomes political (by which I include not just electoral politics, but also and especially topics like sexism, racism, privilege, political correctness, genetic differences in intelligence, etc.) is moved to the latest political thread. The idea is to have a “walled garden inside the walled garden” so that people who want LW to be a nominally politics-free environment can still approximate that experience, while does who don’t get to discuss these topics in the specific threads for them, and only there.
Another way to achieve a similar effect is to post about electoral politics, sexism, racism, privilege, political correctness, genetic differences in intelligence, and similar “political” issues (by which I mean here issues with such pervasive partisan associations that we expect discussions of them to become subject to the failure modes created by such associations) on our own blogs*, and include links to those discussions on LW where we think they are of general interest to the LW community.
That way, LW members who want to discuss (some or all of) these topics in a way that doesn’t spill over into the larger LW forum can do so without bothering anyone else.
* Where “blogs” here means, more broadly, any conversation-hosting forum, including anonymous ones created for the purpose if we want.
One problem with that suggestion is that these discussions often arise organically in a LW thread ostensibly dedicated to another topic, and they may arise between people who don’t have other blogs or natural places to take the conversation when it arises.
In fact, having posts with “(Politics)” in the title might allow people to avoid it better, because it might make politics come up less often in other threads.
My initial idea was a (weekly?) politics open thread, to make it as easy as possible to avoid politics threads / prevent risk of /discussion getting swamped by [politics]-tagged threads, but given the criticisms that have been raised of the karma system already, it’s probably best to keep it offsite. There’s already a network of rationality blogs; maybe lw-politics could be split off as a group blog? That might make it too difficult for people to start topics, though—so your idea is probably best. Possibly have a separate lw-politics feed / link aggregator that relevant posts could be submitted to, so they don’t get missed by people who would be interested and people don’t have to maintain their own RSS feeds to catch all the relevant posts.
If such linking becomes common, I would appreciate an explicit request to “please have substantive discussion over there, not here.” This also avoids the problem of a conversation being fragmented across two discussion sites.