Evolution is also a political issue. Shall we now refrain from talking about evolution, or mentioning what widespread refusal to accept evolution, up to the point of there being a strong movement to undermine the teaching of evolution in US schools, says about human rationality?
I get that it can be especially hard to think rationally about politics. And I agree with what Eliezer has written about government policy being complex and almost always involving some trade-offs, so that we should be careful about thinking there’s an obvious “rationalist view” on policy questions.
However, a ban on discussing issues that happen to be politicized is idiotic, because it puts us at the mercy of contingent facts about what forms of irrationality happen to be prevalent in political discussion at this time. Evolution is a prime example of this. Also, if the singularity became a political issue, would we ban discussion of that from LessWrong?
We should not insert political issues which are not relevant to the topic, because the more political issues one brings to the discussion, the less rational it becomes. It would be most safe to discuss all issues separately, but sometimes is it not possible, e.g. when the topic being discussed relies heavily on evolution.
One part of trying to be rational is to accept that people are not rational, and act accordingly. For every political topic there is a number of people whose minds will turn off if they read something they disagree with. It does not mean we should be quiet on the topic, but we should not insert it where it is not relevant.
Explaining why X is true, in a separate article, is correct approach. Saying or suggesting something like “by the way, people who don’t think X is true are wrong” in an unrelated topic, is wrong approach. Why is it so? In the first example you expect your proof of X to be discussed in the comments, because it is the issue. In the second example, discussions about X in comments are off-topic. Asserting X in a place where discussion of X is unwelcome, is a kind of Dark Arts; we should avoid it even if we think X is true.
The topic of evolution, unlike the topic of climate change, is entangled with human psychology, AI, and many other important topics; not discussing it would be highly costly. Moreover, if anyone on LessWrong disagrees with evolution, it’s probably along Newsomian eccentric lines, not along tribal political lines. Also, lukeprog’s comments on the subject made implicit claims about the policy implications of the science, not just about the science itself, which in turn is less clear-cut than the scientific case against a hypothesis requiring a supernatural agent, though for God’s sake please nobody start arguing about exactly how clear-cut.
As a matter of basic netiquette, please use words like “mistaken” or “harmful” instead of “idiotic” to describe views you disagree with.
This post is mostly directed at newbies, which aren’t supposed to be trained in trying to keep their brain from shutting down whenever the “politics” pattern matcher goes off.
In other words, it could cause some readers to stop reading before they get to the gist of the post. Even at Hacker News, I sometimes see “I stopped reading at this point” posts.
Also, I see zero benefit from mentioning global warming specifically in this post. Even a slight drawback outweigh zero benefit.
Oh dear… I admit I hadn’t thought of the folks who will literally stop reading when they hit a political opinion they don’t like. Yeah, I’ve encountered them. Though I think they have bigger problems than not knowing how to fix science, and don’t think mentioning AGW did zero for this post.
(I don’t necessarily disagree with your points, I was simply making a relevant factual claim; yet you seem to have unhesitatingly interpreted my factual claim as automatically implying all sorts of things about what policies I would or would not endorse. Hm...)
I didn’t interpret it as anything about what gov. policies you’d endorse. I did infer you agreed with Steven’s comment. But anyway, my first comment may not have been clear enough, and I think the second comment should be a useful explication of the first one.
(Actually, I meant to type “Maybe… isn’t the right analysis...” or “Maybe… is the wrong analysis...” That was intended as acknowledgement of the reasons to be cautious about talking policy. But I botched that part. Oops.)
I didn’t interpret it as anything about what gov. policies you’d endorse
By “policies” I meant “norms of discourse on Less Wrong”. I don’t have any strong opinions about them; I don’t unhesitatingly agree with Steven’s opinion. Anyway I’m glad this thread didn’t end up in needless animosity; I’m worried that discussing discussing global warming, or more generally discussing what should be discussed, might be more heated than discussing global warming itself.
As for the difference with the singularity, views on that are not divided much along tribal political lines (ETA: as you acknowledge), and LessWrong seems much better placed to have positive influence there because the topic has received much less attention, because of LessWrong’s strong connection (sociological if nothing else) with the Singularity Institute, and because it’s a lot more likely to amount to an existential risk in the eyes of most people here of any political persuasion, though again let’s not discuss whether they’re right.
Evolution is also a political issue. Shall we now refrain from talking about evolution, or mentioning what widespread refusal to accept evolution, up to the point of there being a strong movement to undermine the teaching of evolution in US schools, says about human rationality?
I get that it can be especially hard to think rationally about politics. And I agree with what Eliezer has written about government policy being complex and almost always involving some trade-offs, so that we should be careful about thinking there’s an obvious “rationalist view” on policy questions.
However, a ban on discussing issues that happen to be politicized is idiotic, because it puts us at the mercy of contingent facts about what forms of irrationality happen to be prevalent in political discussion at this time. Evolution is a prime example of this. Also, if the singularity became a political issue, would we ban discussion of that from LessWrong?
We should not insert political issues which are not relevant to the topic, because the more political issues one brings to the discussion, the less rational it becomes. It would be most safe to discuss all issues separately, but sometimes is it not possible, e.g. when the topic being discussed relies heavily on evolution.
One part of trying to be rational is to accept that people are not rational, and act accordingly. For every political topic there is a number of people whose minds will turn off if they read something they disagree with. It does not mean we should be quiet on the topic, but we should not insert it where it is not relevant.
Explaining why X is true, in a separate article, is correct approach. Saying or suggesting something like “by the way, people who don’t think X is true are wrong” in an unrelated topic, is wrong approach. Why is it so? In the first example you expect your proof of X to be discussed in the comments, because it is the issue. In the second example, discussions about X in comments are off-topic. Asserting X in a place where discussion of X is unwelcome, is a kind of Dark Arts; we should avoid it even if we think X is true.
The topic of evolution, unlike the topic of climate change, is entangled with human psychology, AI, and many other important topics; not discussing it would be highly costly. Moreover, if anyone on LessWrong disagrees with evolution, it’s probably along Newsomian eccentric lines, not along tribal political lines. Also, lukeprog’s comments on the subject made implicit claims about the policy implications of the science, not just about the science itself, which in turn is less clear-cut than the scientific case against a hypothesis requiring a supernatural agent, though for God’s sake please nobody start arguing about exactly how clear-cut.
As a matter of basic netiquette, please use words like “mistaken” or “harmful” instead of “idiotic” to describe views you disagree with.
This post is mostly directed at newbies, which aren’t supposed to be trained in trying to keep their brain from shutting down whenever the “politics” pattern matcher goes off.
In other words, it could cause some readers to stop reading before they get to the gist of the post. Even at Hacker News, I sometimes see “I stopped reading at this point” posts.
Also, I see zero benefit from mentioning global warming specifically in this post. Even a slight drawback outweigh zero benefit.
Oh dear… I admit I hadn’t thought of the folks who will literally stop reading when they hit a political opinion they don’t like. Yeah, I’ve encountered them. Though I think they have bigger problems than not knowing how to fix science, and don’t think mentioning AGW did zero for this post.
(I don’t necessarily disagree with your points, I was simply making a relevant factual claim; yet you seem to have unhesitatingly interpreted my factual claim as automatically implying all sorts of things about what policies I would or would not endorse. Hm...)
I didn’t interpret it as anything about what gov. policies you’d endorse. I did infer you agreed with Steven’s comment. But anyway, my first comment may not have been clear enough, and I think the second comment should be a useful explication of the first one.
(Actually, I meant to type “Maybe… isn’t the right analysis...” or “Maybe… is the wrong analysis...” That was intended as acknowledgement of the reasons to be cautious about talking policy. But I botched that part. Oops.)
By “policies” I meant “norms of discourse on Less Wrong”. I don’t have any strong opinions about them; I don’t unhesitatingly agree with Steven’s opinion. Anyway I’m glad this thread didn’t end up in needless animosity; I’m worried that discussing discussing global warming, or more generally discussing what should be discussed, might be more heated than discussing global warming itself.
Yeah. I thought of making another thread for this issue.
As for the difference with the singularity, views on that are not divided much along tribal political lines (ETA: as you acknowledge), and LessWrong seems much better placed to have positive influence there because the topic has received much less attention, because of LessWrong’s strong connection (sociological if nothing else) with the Singularity Institute, and because it’s a lot more likely to amount to an existential risk in the eyes of most people here of any political persuasion, though again let’s not discuss whether they’re right.