I strongly suspect that it’s harmful for LessWrong to have unpersuasive posts arguing for unpopular views on emotionally fraught, low value topics, and that it’s harmful for LessWrong to have object-level comments on such posts.
My current take is that it seems fairly important for the personal-blog section to actually be a place you can use as your personal blog without worrying overmuch about what the LessWrong mods think of your opinions. There are lines one could cross, but it’d have to be in the “extremely bad” camp rather than “pretty bad.”
Would you share your model? My intuition is that there are no topics or opinions that should be shunned, because if tolerating a topic leads to bad outcomes, then you just have bad epistemics. i.e. it’s a bandaid solution for your average conflict-theorist internet community that I think the thoroughly mistake-theorist LW doesn’t need.
LW is a public website existing in a conflict-theorist world. My impression is discussions on this subject and various others are doomed to be “fake” in the sense that important considerations will be left out, and will provide material for critics to misrepresent as being typical of rationalists. If I recall correctly, a somewhat similar thread on LW 1.0 (I can’t immediately find it, but it involved someone being on fire as a metaphor) turned into a major blow-up that people left the site over. I don’t see any upside to outweigh these downsides. Maybe there’s honor in being able to handle this, but if we can’t handle this, then that doesn’t mean it will help to act as if we can.
I strongly suspect that it’s harmful for LessWrong to have unpersuasive posts arguing for unpopular views on emotionally fraught, low value topics, and that it’s harmful for LessWrong to have object-level comments on such posts.
My current take is that it seems fairly important for the personal-blog section to actually be a place you can use as your personal blog without worrying overmuch about what the LessWrong mods think of your opinions. There are lines one could cross, but it’d have to be in the “extremely bad” camp rather than “pretty bad.”
I didn’t mean to argue that this deserves mod attention, just that it shouldn’t have been posted or commented on.
Would you share your model? My intuition is that there are no topics or opinions that should be shunned, because if tolerating a topic leads to bad outcomes, then you just have bad epistemics. i.e. it’s a bandaid solution for your average conflict-theorist internet community that I think the thoroughly mistake-theorist LW doesn’t need.
There is honor in it if we could handle this.
LW is a public website existing in a conflict-theorist world. My impression is discussions on this subject and various others are doomed to be “fake” in the sense that important considerations will be left out, and will provide material for critics to misrepresent as being typical of rationalists. If I recall correctly, a somewhat similar thread on LW 1.0 (I can’t immediately find it, but it involved someone being on fire as a metaphor) turned into a major blow-up that people left the site over. I don’t see any upside to outweigh these downsides. Maybe there’s honor in being able to handle this, but if we can’t handle this, then that doesn’t mean it will help to act as if we can.