I’ve had the idea before that a group of LWers keen to start an inflammatory political argument could help keep LW cool by having the argument on an unrelated, pre-existing, general politics forum. They could link the argument on the Open Thread so the rest of us know it’s happening.
Possible advantages & disadvantages:
fewer political flame-outs on LW...
...more political flame-outs on Unnamed Other Forum
other forum posters would likely have worse argumentative norms...
...but you could look for a forum with relatively good norms to minimize this (a pre-existing LW-affiliated blog/network, or a traditional rationalist/sceptic forum with a politics subforum?)
LWers modelling good argumentative norms to strangers might get the strangers to up their own game...
...or social contagion might happen in the other direction, with LWers regressing towards the mean for online political arguments
has the trivial inconvenience of requiring LWers to register on another forum and post there, even as they continue to post other stuff here...
...but maybe a trivial inconvenience is what you want if you think the marginal LW political argument has net negative value
could be interpreted as a forum invasion...
...but it’s not like LWers are trolls, and only a few LWers would likely bother with this anyway, so they’d probably blend into a bigger on-topic forum without much fuss
I’ve had the idea before that a group of LWers keen to start an inflammatory political argument could help keep LW cool by having the argument on an unrelated, pre-existing, general politics forum. They could link the argument on the Open Thread so the rest of us know it’s happening.
Possible advantages & disadvantages:
fewer political flame-outs on LW...
...more political flame-outs on Unnamed Other Forum
other forum posters would likely have worse argumentative norms...
...but you could look for a forum with relatively good norms to minimize this (a pre-existing LW-affiliated blog/network, or a traditional rationalist/sceptic forum with a politics subforum?)
LWers modelling good argumentative norms to strangers might get the strangers to up their own game...
...or social contagion might happen in the other direction, with LWers regressing towards the mean for online political arguments
has the trivial inconvenience of requiring LWers to register on another forum and post there, even as they continue to post other stuff here...
...but maybe a trivial inconvenience is what you want if you think the marginal LW political argument has net negative value
could be interpreted as a forum invasion...
...but it’s not like LWers are trolls, and only a few LWers would likely bother with this anyway, so they’d probably blend into a bigger on-topic forum without much fuss
might entrench misinterpretations of “Politics is the Mindkiller”
in the unlikely event this became a firmly established norm, LWers might start demanding threads be taken elsewhere at the least scent of politics
We could easily use the LessWrong subreddit for that purpose, or create a LWPolitics subreddit.
Interesting idea. There doesn’t seem to be much traffic there, I wonder if the mods would be open to it?