It looks like the political/controversial points provoked less argument here than in the 2012 post. I’d guess this is down to increasing political heterogeneity on LW over time, but maybe it’s just because there are more people here now. (Or maybe Multiheaded’s more dramatic framing in the 2012 post primed people to argue more vigorously? Dunno.)
“the most important application of improving rationality is not projects like friendly AI or futarchy, but ordinary politics”
“Forbidden topics!”
“I’ve heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren’t necessarily as harmful as they may seem.”
“In western societies, it’s an orthodoxy, a moral fashion, to say that sex between children/adolescents and adults is bad. This can be clearly seen because people who argue against the orthodoxy are not criticised for being wrong, but condemned for being bad.”
“within [sic?] human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, [sic] and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations”
“it’s important to not downvote contributors to this survey if they sound honest, but voice silly-sounding or offending opinions”
“That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false.”
“I believe that there are very significant correlations between intelligence and race. [...] I believe that the reasons white people enslaved black people, and not the other way around is due to average intelligence differences.”
“There is a very strong pressure to be “Politically Correct”, and it seems that most beliefs that would be tagged with “Politically Correct” are tagged with that because they cannot be tagged with “Correct”.”
“Men and women think differently. Ditto that modern Western women hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy.”
“As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information. Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished.”
“Bearing children is immoral.”
“All discussion of gender relations on LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or any similar forum, will converge on GenderFail.” (This last one’s from April 2010, but still.)
“All discussion of gender relations on LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or any similar forum, will converge on GenderFail.” (This last one’s from April 2010, but still.)
It’s unclear to me that this is that LW specific. If you asked any large sample of western Internet users for anonymous and unaccountable statements of controversial opinions would you get results that are that different? If not, then it’s more a description of the Internet.
The only thing that’s LW specific is the suggestion that the most effective use of rationality is going to be politics.
I guess satt’s point is that back in 2010 that stuff wasn’t discussed outside “Closet survey” and threads like that, whereas more recently people have done that in otherwise regular threads causing some drama and mind-killing (though IMO certain LWers overstate the extent to which this is a problem).
Keeping discussions of potentially mind-killing topics quarantined to specially designated threads may be a superior solution to either banning them altogether or allowing them throughout the site.
My point was more that I had a causal model in my head (much higher proportion of LWers thinking/talking about controversial topics in 2012 → more LW drama in 2012), but realized it was wrong when I read the comments here, felt confused, and noticedI was confused. (It’s a pretty mundane example of noticing confusion but I doubt I’m the only one whose mental model was wrong in this way.)
Coincidentally, I just found a sort of similar post by taw when I was idly Googling “reference class tennis”. It mentions climate change scientists as examples of politicized science, and namedrops “race and IQ, nuclear winter, and pretty much everything in macroeconomics” as times when “such science was completely wrong”. Also, although taw’s ultimate point was actually about reference class forecasting, a lot of the comments focused on his object-level examples of scientific controversy instead. That happened back in 2009 as well.
As for what to do about drama, I’ll hold off on making suggestions. It’s not something top-down policy is likely to fix without unhappy side effects, and LW’s ultimately an entertainment device for me (albeit one that sometimes makes me think). If it turns into something un-fun, I’ll just go and procrastinate with something else.
(Meta-comment.) These 2009-era comments raise political/controversial points and meta-commentary I associate with latter-day LW, not OG LW, which surprises me a bit. (Examples below.) Given the more recent signs of escalating political tensions on LW, I wouldn’t have expected these older comments to hit the same beats as, say, Multiheaded’s analogous thread from this year, but a bunch did.
It looks like the political/controversial points provoked less argument here than in the 2012 post. I’d guess this is down to increasing political heterogeneity on LW over time, but maybe it’s just because there are more people here now. (Or maybe Multiheaded’s more dramatic framing in the 2012 post primed people to argue more vigorously? Dunno.)
“the most important application of improving rationality is not projects like friendly AI or futarchy, but ordinary politics”
“Forbidden topics!”
“I’ve heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren’t necessarily as harmful as they may seem.”
“In western societies, it’s an orthodoxy, a moral fashion, to say that sex between children/adolescents and adults is bad. This can be clearly seen because people who argue against the orthodoxy are not criticised for being wrong, but condemned for being bad.”
“within [sic?] human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, [sic] and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations”
“it’s important to not downvote contributors to this survey if they sound honest, but voice silly-sounding or offending opinions”
“That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false.”
“I believe that there are very significant correlations between intelligence and race. [...] I believe that the reasons white people enslaved black people, and not the other way around is due to average intelligence differences.”
“There is a very strong pressure to be “Politically Correct”, and it seems that most beliefs that would be tagged with “Politically Correct” are tagged with that because they cannot be tagged with “Correct”.”
“Men and women think differently. Ditto that modern Western women hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy.”
“As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information. Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished.”
“Bearing children is immoral.”
“All discussion of gender relations on LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or any similar forum, will converge on GenderFail.” (This last one’s from April 2010, but still.)
[emphasis added]
Wow. Essentially, they prophesied Elevatorgate.
It isn’t prophecy if you have a large-n sample.
It’s reference class forecasting!
It’s unclear to me that this is that LW specific. If you asked any large sample of western Internet users for anonymous and unaccountable statements of controversial opinions would you get results that are that different? If not, then it’s more a description of the Internet.
The only thing that’s LW specific is the suggestion that the most effective use of rationality is going to be politics.
I guess satt’s point is that back in 2010 that stuff wasn’t discussed outside “Closet survey” and threads like that, whereas more recently people have done that in otherwise regular threads causing some drama and mind-killing (though IMO certain LWers overstate the extent to which this is a problem).
Keeping discussions of potentially mind-killing topics quarantined to specially designated threads may be a superior solution to either banning them altogether or allowing them throughout the site.
My point was more that I had a causal model in my head (much higher proportion of LWers thinking/talking about controversial topics in 2012 → more LW drama in 2012), but realized it was wrong when I read the comments here, felt confused, and noticed I was confused. (It’s a pretty mundane example of noticing confusion but I doubt I’m the only one whose mental model was wrong in this way.)
Coincidentally, I just found a sort of similar post by taw when I was idly Googling “reference class tennis”. It mentions climate change scientists as examples of politicized science, and namedrops “race and IQ, nuclear winter, and pretty much everything in macroeconomics” as times when “such science was completely wrong”. Also, although taw’s ultimate point was actually about reference class forecasting, a lot of the comments focused on his object-level examples of scientific controversy instead. That happened back in 2009 as well.
As for what to do about drama, I’ll hold off on making suggestions. It’s not something top-down policy is likely to fix without unhappy side effects, and LW’s ultimately an entertainment device for me (albeit one that sometimes makes me think). If it turns into something un-fun, I’ll just go and procrastinate with something else.