Thanks for the clarification. That was my impression as well, and I didn’t expect this post to be on the frontpage.
With that said: if you remember off the top of your head, can you link to some content that dealt with CW/political issues but still met frontpage standards? Would my Quillette piece meet the standards? The less lazy version of Jacob that you envisioned is discouraged partly because he doesn’t know what the standards are for touchy subjects and is worried that even if he tried it won’t be on the frontpage.
(To be clear, the real version of Jacob is just too lazy to do major rewrites of posts for LW, it has nothing to do with standard ambiguity).
I do think it’s fairly hard to write a current-political-hotbutton piece that’s we’d promote to Frontpage.
Rather than having hard and fast rules here, we basically ask ourselves “does this piece a) feel like it’s helpful us to understand something, vs trying to persuade us of something? and b) does this piece feel like it’d start moving LW in a direction where discourse would degrade [likely via attracting people to LW who are specifically interested in culture war stuff for it’s own sake].”
The Quillette piece did feel substantially better to me than What the Haters Hate. But it does still feel like it’s… orienting itself within the culture war frame, in a way that would attract more culture warriors. It sort of feels like it’s trying to persuade me of something.
A piece that tackled a similar issue but was promoted to frontpage was Decouplers vs Contextualizers. This abstracted away the CW stuff, in a way that helped you understand the culture war without pulling you into it. I do think most culture-war-related topics would need to be similarly abstracted.
That piece did rely somewhat on other pieces (including one by you) to help provide the background. I think those background pieces were good to have as part of the rationalist discourse, but still probably weren’t something we’d want front-and-center on frontpage. (Frontpage isn’t supposed to mean “the important stuff”, it’s meant to be “the stuff that we’re comfortable having as people’s first/primary experience of LW)
Thanks for the clarification. That was my impression as well, and I didn’t expect this post to be on the frontpage.
With that said: if you remember off the top of your head, can you link to some content that dealt with CW/political issues but still met frontpage standards? Would my Quillette piece meet the standards? The less lazy version of Jacob that you envisioned is discouraged partly because he doesn’t know what the standards are for touchy subjects and is worried that even if he tried it won’t be on the frontpage.
(To be clear, the real version of Jacob is just too lazy to do major rewrites of posts for LW, it has nothing to do with standard ambiguity).
I do think it’s fairly hard to write a current-political-hotbutton piece that’s we’d promote to Frontpage.
Rather than having hard and fast rules here, we basically ask ourselves “does this piece a) feel like it’s helpful us to understand something, vs trying to persuade us of something? and b) does this piece feel like it’d start moving LW in a direction where discourse would degrade [likely via attracting people to LW who are specifically interested in culture war stuff for it’s own sake].”
The Quillette piece did feel substantially better to me than What the Haters Hate. But it does still feel like it’s… orienting itself within the culture war frame, in a way that would attract more culture warriors. It sort of feels like it’s trying to persuade me of something.
A piece that tackled a similar issue but was promoted to frontpage was Decouplers vs Contextualizers. This abstracted away the CW stuff, in a way that helped you understand the culture war without pulling you into it. I do think most culture-war-related topics would need to be similarly abstracted.
That piece did rely somewhat on other pieces (including one by you) to help provide the background. I think those background pieces were good to have as part of the rationalist discourse, but still probably weren’t something we’d want front-and-center on frontpage. (Frontpage isn’t supposed to mean “the important stuff”, it’s meant to be “the stuff that we’re comfortable having as people’s first/primary experience of LW)