(Or you could just say that any successful political strategist should be shunned on LW, because 5⁄10 manipulativeness is already too high and LW’s rationality, research, and cooperation goals would be compromised if we absorbed too many memes from that kind of person.)
Taking a step back, I thought Less Wrong had a no-frontpaged-politics rule and Zvi’s Covid posts were specifically whitelisted. So now I’m a bit confused why this post on Cummings was frontpaged (though I appreciated OP making the significant effort of summarizing Cummings’ ridiculously verbose writings).
On the other hand, Cummings’ perspective on making policy and working in governmental institutions is so different from how I usually see this stuff described that not having this kind of perspective around seems like it would diminish our maps. A conundrum.
I made the decision to frontpage it, probably a mistake so I’ve changed it. My interpretation (which is maybe a bad one) about the frontpage ban on politics is it’s to avoid hot-button topics that people get riled up. I was thinking of Cummings having a lot of general dry/abstract policy models more akin to economics than right/left issues.
I haven’t read the posts Connor linked—if those posts are generally about hot-button topics, I’d treat this post as a hot-button political thing. If the posts themselves are fine, I wouldn’t de-frontpage just because the author (Cummings) is controversial.
One problem here is that Cummings writes ridiculously long essays instead of sequences split up into separate short essays, so it seems likely to me that most of his essays will include both controversial politics and his idiosyncratic perspective of policy. Which makes it much harder to share any of his specific insights without giving the impression that one endorses the whole package.
Taking a step back, I thought Less Wrong had a no-frontpaged-politics rule and Zvi’s Covid posts were specifically whitelisted. So now I’m a bit confused why this post on Cummings was frontpaged (though I appreciated OP making the significant effort of summarizing Cummings’ ridiculously verbose writings).
On the other hand, Cummings’ perspective on making policy and working in governmental institutions is so different from how I usually see this stuff described that not having this kind of perspective around seems like it would diminish our maps. A conundrum.
I made the decision to frontpage it, probably a mistake so I’ve changed it. My interpretation (which is maybe a bad one) about the frontpage ban on politics is it’s to avoid hot-button topics that people get riled up. I was thinking of Cummings having a lot of general dry/abstract policy models more akin to economics than right/left issues.
I haven’t read the posts Connor linked—if those posts are generally about hot-button topics, I’d treat this post as a hot-button political thing. If the posts themselves are fine, I wouldn’t de-frontpage just because the author (Cummings) is controversial.
E.g., if Cummings himself posted on LW I assume we wouldn’t de-frontpage his stuff just because of who he is; it would depend on the contents.
The links contain the Brexit campaign story.
One problem here is that Cummings writes ridiculously long essays instead of sequences split up into separate short essays, so it seems likely to me that most of his essays will include both controversial politics and his idiosyncratic perspective of policy. Which makes it much harder to share any of his specific insights without giving the impression that one endorses the whole package.