Quick note that the mod team had been observing this post and the surrounding discussion and not 100% sure how to think about it. The post itself is sufficiently abstracted that unless you’re already aware of the political discussion, it seemed fairly innocuous. Once you’re aware of the political discussion it’s fairly blatant. It’s unclear to me how bad this is.
I do not have much confidence in any of the policies we could pick and stick to here. I’ve been mostly satisfied with the resulting conversation on LW staying pretty abstract and meta level.
Perhaps also worth noting: I was looking through two other recent posts, Tale of Alice Almost and In My Culture, through a similar lens. They each give me the impression that they are relating in some way to a political dispute which has been abstracted away, with a vague feeling that the resulting post may somehow still be a part of the political struggle.
I’d like to a have a moderation policy (primarily about whether such posts get frontpaged) that works regardless of whether I actually know anything about any behind-the-scenes drama. I’ve mulled over a few different such policies, each of which would result in different outcomes as to which of the three posts would get frontpaged. But in each case the three posts are hovering near the edge of however I’d classify them.
(The mod team was fairly divided on how important a lens this was and/or exactly how to think about, so just take this as my own personal thoughts for now)
My current model is that I am in favor of people trying to come up with general analogies, even if they are in the middle of thinking about mindkilling topics. I feel like people have all kinds of weird motivations for writing posts, and trying to judge and classify based on them is going to be hard and set up weird metacognitive incentives, whereas just deciding whether something is useful for trying to solve problems in general has overall pretty decent incentives and allows us to channel a lot of people’s motivations about political topics into stuff that is useful in a broader context. (And I think some of Sarah Constantin’s stuff is a good example of ideas that I found useful completely separate from the political context and where I am quite glad she tried to abstract them away from the local political context that probably made her motivated to think about those things)
Quick note that the mod team had been observing this post and the surrounding discussion and not 100% sure how to think about it. The post itself is sufficiently abstracted that unless you’re already aware of the political discussion, it seemed fairly innocuous. Once you’re aware of the political discussion it’s fairly blatant. It’s unclear to me how bad this is.
I do not have much confidence in any of the policies we could pick and stick to here. I’ve been mostly satisfied with the resulting conversation on LW staying pretty abstract and meta level.
Perhaps also worth noting: I was looking through two other recent posts, Tale of Alice Almost and In My Culture, through a similar lens. They each give me the impression that they are relating in some way to a political dispute which has been abstracted away, with a vague feeling that the resulting post may somehow still be a part of the political struggle.
I’d like to a have a moderation policy (primarily about whether such posts get frontpaged) that works regardless of whether I actually know anything about any behind-the-scenes drama. I’ve mulled over a few different such policies, each of which would result in different outcomes as to which of the three posts would get frontpaged. But in each case the three posts are hovering near the edge of however I’d classify them.
(The mod team was fairly divided on how important a lens this was and/or exactly how to think about, so just take this as my own personal thoughts for now)
My current model is that I am in favor of people trying to come up with general analogies, even if they are in the middle of thinking about mindkilling topics. I feel like people have all kinds of weird motivations for writing posts, and trying to judge and classify based on them is going to be hard and set up weird metacognitive incentives, whereas just deciding whether something is useful for trying to solve problems in general has overall pretty decent incentives and allows us to channel a lot of people’s motivations about political topics into stuff that is useful in a broader context. (And I think some of Sarah Constantin’s stuff is a good example of ideas that I found useful completely separate from the political context and where I am quite glad she tried to abstract them away from the local political context that probably made her motivated to think about those things)