I think it is worth pointing out explicitly (though I expect most readers noticed) that Dagon wrote “unless gender categorization is important” and Zack turned it into “unless … categorization is important” and then said “Categorization is hugely relevant”. And that it’s perfectly possible that (1) a general topic can be highly relevant in a particular venue without it being true that (2) a specific case of that general topic is relevant there. And that most likely Dagon was not at all claiming that categorization is not an LW-relevant topic, but that gender categorization in particular is a too-distracting topic.
(I am not sure I agree with what I take Dagon’s position to be. Gender is a very interesting topic, and would be even if it weren’t one that many people feel very strongly about, and it relates to many very LW-ish topics—including, as Zack says, that of categorization more generally. Still, it might be that it’s just too distracting.)
The right word to elide from my objection would be “categorization”—I should have said “unless gender is important”, as that’s the political topic I don’t think we can/should discuss here. Categorization in mathematical abstraction is on-topic, as would be a formal definition/mapping of a relevant category to mathematically-expressible notation.
Loose, informal mappings of non-relevant topics is not useful here.
And honestly, I’m not sure how bright my line is—I can imagine topics related to gender or other human relationship topics that tend to bypass rationality being meta-discussed here, especially if it’s about raising the sanity waterline on such topics, and how to understand what goes wrong when they’re discussed at the object level. I doubt we’d get good results if we had direct object-level debates or points made here on those topics.
I think it is worth pointing out explicitly (though I expect most readers noticed) that Dagon wrote “unless gender categorization is important” and Zack turned it into “unless … categorization is important” and then said “Categorization is hugely relevant”. And that it’s perfectly possible that (1) a general topic can be highly relevant in a particular venue without it being true that (2) a specific case of that general topic is relevant there. And that most likely Dagon was not at all claiming that categorization is not an LW-relevant topic, but that gender categorization in particular is a too-distracting topic.
(I am not sure I agree with what I take Dagon’s position to be. Gender is a very interesting topic, and would be even if it weren’t one that many people feel very strongly about, and it relates to many very LW-ish topics—including, as Zack says, that of categorization more generally. Still, it might be that it’s just too distracting.)
The right word to elide from my objection would be “categorization”—I should have said “unless gender is important”, as that’s the political topic I don’t think we can/should discuss here. Categorization in mathematical abstraction is on-topic, as would be a formal definition/mapping of a relevant category to mathematically-expressible notation.
Loose, informal mappings of non-relevant topics is not useful here.
And honestly, I’m not sure how bright my line is—I can imagine topics related to gender or other human relationship topics that tend to bypass rationality being meta-discussed here, especially if it’s about raising the sanity waterline on such topics, and how to understand what goes wrong when they’re discussed at the object level. I doubt we’d get good results if we had direct object-level debates or points made here on those topics.