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)
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)