My impression was that the sense in which “political” was previously used here had more to do with rival identity groups whose claims on power were disputed — “Blues and Greens”; Republicans and Democrats; socialists and libertarians; and so on.
More recently, however, it seems to be used to excuse bad epistemic behavior — responding to straw men or stereotypes; mere contradiction; attacking noncentral points; etc. — on any topic pertaining to contemporary human society or social organization.
Avoiding the tribalism doesn’t mean avoiding all the object-level bits of reality the tribes are interested in.
It seems...broken if I can get together a group of people and say “we have strong opinions about X and we call ourselves Xians” and then LessWrong doesn’t discuss X anymore.
It seems...broken if I can get together a group of people and say “we have strong opinions about X and we call ourselves Xians” and then LessWrong doesn’t discuss X anymore.
I never said we couldn’t have political discussions about X. What I said was don’t use X as an example when making a non-political point.
I’m not sure LW is using a consistent definition of ‘political’, but possibly I’m misremembering what I’ve seen.
My impression was that the sense in which “political” was previously used here had more to do with rival identity groups whose claims on power were disputed — “Blues and Greens”; Republicans and Democrats; socialists and libertarians; and so on.
More recently, however, it seems to be used to excuse bad epistemic behavior — responding to straw men or stereotypes; mere contradiction; attacking noncentral points; etc. — on any topic pertaining to contemporary human society or social organization.
feminists vs. PUA/MRA
Avoiding the tribalism doesn’t mean avoiding all the object-level bits of reality the tribes are interested in.
It seems...broken if I can get together a group of people and say “we have strong opinions about X and we call ourselves Xians” and then LessWrong doesn’t discuss X anymore.
I never said we couldn’t have political discussions about X. What I said was don’t use X as an example when making a non-political point.