“Politics is the mind-killer” was a good try, but it turns out to not be an evolutionarily stable strategy: if the people with good epistemology stay away from anything that looks too “political”, all communities end up getting dominated by people with bad epistemologies who aren’t afraid of getting political. We need a discipline of “defensive politics”: clever strategies and social technologies to keep communities and institutions focused on their original purpose (in our case, advancing the art of human rationality), even as they recruit newcomers who (like all humans) have their own goals only partially aligned with the community’s goals.
if the people with good epistemology stay away from anything that looks too “political”, all communities end up getting dominated by people with bad epistemologies who aren’t afraid of getting political.
Disagree. There are multiple communities, and one can very reasonably say “that’s a fine topic, but not for here”. This is what I mean to say—I’m not disagreeing or claiming that it’s unimportant or even claiming that it’s not fit for rationalists to have opinions on. I’m saying that it’s a topic which this forum is bad at and I’d rather it be discussed elsewhere.
There are 7 upvotes so far, and a fair bit of discussion, so this is apparently not a unanimous opinion. I’ll probably make a similar objection to new discussion posts on politically-charged topics, but as always you should feel free to ignore me.
“Politics is the mind-killer” was a good try, but it turns out to not be an evolutionarily stable strategy: if the people with good epistemology stay away from anything that looks too “political”, all communities end up getting dominated by people with bad epistemologies who aren’t afraid of getting political. We need a discipline of “defensive politics”: clever strategies and social technologies to keep communities and institutions focused on their original purpose (in our case, advancing the art of human rationality), even as they recruit newcomers who (like all humans) have their own goals only partially aligned with the community’s goals.
Disagree. There are multiple communities, and one can very reasonably say “that’s a fine topic, but not for here”. This is what I mean to say—I’m not disagreeing or claiming that it’s unimportant or even claiming that it’s not fit for rationalists to have opinions on. I’m saying that it’s a topic which this forum is bad at and I’d rather it be discussed elsewhere.
There are 7 upvotes so far, and a fair bit of discussion, so this is apparently not a unanimous opinion. I’ll probably make a similar objection to new discussion posts on politically-charged topics, but as always you should feel free to ignore me.