I really don’t think it is. Sure, there’s a zero point that I didn’t explicitly mention (no normative weight given to political alignment, as opposed to actively encouraging or discouraging its expression), but we don’t need to encourage expressing tribal identity for it to dominate political discussions. It’s the default. That’s the underlying theme of the politics sequence that we usually point to with the “Mind-Killer” catchphrase, and the implicit rationale behind the norm. Now, we don’t have a lot of recent data, but in view of LW’s performance when discussing identity-linked but not conventionally political issues, I don’t remotely trust our commentariat to be inherently awesome enough to overcome this problem.
We could of course debate the exact extent to which factional considerations ought to be deemphasized, but at that point we’re just quibbling about details.
I really don’t think it is. Sure, there’s a zero point that I didn’t explicitly mention (no normative weight given to political alignment, as opposed to actively encouraging or discouraging its expression), but we don’t need to encourage expressing tribal identity for it to dominate political discussions. It’s the default. That’s the underlying theme of the politics sequence that we usually point to with the “Mind-Killer” catchphrase, and the implicit rationale behind the norm. Now, we don’t have a lot of recent data, but in view of LW’s performance when discussing identity-linked but not conventionally political issues, I don’t remotely trust our commentariat to be inherently awesome enough to overcome this problem.
We could of course debate the exact extent to which factional considerations ought to be deemphasized, but at that point we’re just quibbling about details.
Details that seem to me—by your own assertion—to be the exact details we need to discuss here.
Can I get away with outright accusing you of irrationally defending a blanket ban on political or meta-political dialogue now?
Guess not. Would have liked to see inferential silence avoided here.