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)
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)