Agreed. I think avoiding politics on LW does more harm than good overall these days, and that people get mindkilled in plenty of other ways even without it. (I personally don’t want to talk about politics on LW, but I’m in favor of other people doing so, especially to the extent that it results in political action.)
This would be a problem with an obvious solution if Discussion was structured anything like a normal forum.
Main is one thing. The “community blog” structure works there. But Discussion in reality functions like a forum and it suffers from the lack of basic, common forum-features like sticky threads, posts bumping based on activity, and the ability to create sub-fora.
If politics had its own sub-forum, people could choose to enter it or not, simple as that. Nothing fancy about it—political discussion available, but cordoned off behind one more click. Same feature could help organize the subject matter more effectively in other areas too. No need to slice it too fine. Say you have a main area for all the general rationality and logic stuff, as well as site-business things like a welcome thread and site-related posts like this one. Then you have a few—two or three, no more than five—sub-fora split into “Science”, “Politics”, “AI” etc.
Now one could argue that the creation of a politics section of any sort would attract a different type of member and that could impact the discourse in other areas. Not saying that’s not a possibility but heck, LW attracts a fair few cranks anyway.
Mind, I don’t know how possible any of these changes are—I’m only arguing their desirability.
There is additionally the point that the ban leads to people compartmentalizing rationalist thought practices from politics. How do you become a rationalist political being if you aren’t able to practice rationalist politics in the supportive company of other rationalists?
I’m not steven0461, but I’m pretty sure the intended meaning is: Asking for a “rationalist political being” is like asking for a “clean sewer”; it’s a contradiction in terms because politics is fundamentally anti-rational. So when you say “How do you become a rationalist political being if …” you have already made a mistake.
(I don’t think I agree; politics is part of the real world and I see no reason to think that rationalists should never find sufficient reason to become involved. I might agree with the more modest claim that most of us most of the time would do well to pay much less attention to politics than we do.)
There is the obvious counterargument of “Try ignoring your sewer system for a few years and see where it gets you”. I suspect that drowning in shit is not a pleasant experience.
Maybe. But most of us get to influence government policy mostly via involvement in politics, and if (in someone’s opinion) politics is fundamentally anti-rational then they may conclude that almost all rationalists should try to minimize the time and effort and emotional investment they give to government policy.
But I’m engaging in the usually-futile activity of defending the position of someone else with whom I don’t entirely agree, and who is in fact (I assume) here and able to defend himself. So I’ll stop.
How do you become a rationalist political being if you aren’t able to practice rationalist politics in the supportive company of other rationalists?
I don’t think LW qualifies as a sufficiently supportive company of rationalists for at least two major reasons: (1) Eugine and his army of sockpuppets, (2) anyone can join, rationalist or not, and talking about politics would most likely attract the wrong kind people, so even if LW would qualify as a sufficiently supportive company of rationalists now, that could easily change overnight.
I imagine that if we could solve the problem of sockpuppets and/or create a system of “trusted users” who could moderate the debate, we would have a chance to debate politics rationally. But I suspect that a rational political debate would be quite boring for most people.
To give an example of “boring politics”, when Trump was elected, half people on internet were posting messages like “that’s great, now Americal will be great again”, half people on internet were posting messages like “that’s horrible, now racists and sexist will be everywhere, and we are all doomed”… and there was a tiny group of people posting messages like “having Trump elected increased value of funds in sectors A, B, C, and decreased value of funds in sectors X, Y, Z, so by hedging against this outcome I made N% money”. You didn’t have to tell these people that rationalists are supposed to bet on their beliefs, because they already did.
and there was a tiny group of people posting messages like “having Trump elected increased value of funds in sectors A, B, C, and decreased value of funds in sectors X, Y, Z, so by hedging against this outcome I made N% money”.
Funnily enough, I heard rumors that George Soros placed a big bet on the markets going down after the election and lost very very badly.
I think it is a rather unsympathetic strawman characterization of what they rationalist political debate would be. Even if one could make money off of purely thinking—and I don’t want to debate the efficient market hypothesis here—I would hope that the purpose of the debate would be over rational government policies that address the underlying concerns of all sides. For example, what underlying fears and insecurities lead to support for trumps anti-immigration, anti-Muslim position? What legitimate basis exists, charitably, for these fears? What potential policy could both address these underlying concerns, and be supported by both parties and independents? More to the point, what additional data would be useful to have, in the form of polls that are not currently being conducted or some such?
Nate Silver’s 538 blog is an example of such a rationalist resource, but he only covers politics during election season and there isn’t much community building going on.
Agreed. I think avoiding politics on LW does more harm than good overall these days, and that people get mindkilled in plenty of other ways even without it. (I personally don’t want to talk about politics on LW, but I’m in favor of other people doing so, especially to the extent that it results in political action.)
This would be a problem with an obvious solution if Discussion was structured anything like a normal forum.
Main is one thing. The “community blog” structure works there. But Discussion in reality functions like a forum and it suffers from the lack of basic, common forum-features like sticky threads, posts bumping based on activity, and the ability to create sub-fora.
If politics had its own sub-forum, people could choose to enter it or not, simple as that. Nothing fancy about it—political discussion available, but cordoned off behind one more click. Same feature could help organize the subject matter more effectively in other areas too. No need to slice it too fine. Say you have a main area for all the general rationality and logic stuff, as well as site-business things like a welcome thread and site-related posts like this one. Then you have a few—two or three, no more than five—sub-fora split into “Science”, “Politics”, “AI” etc.
Now one could argue that the creation of a politics section of any sort would attract a different type of member and that could impact the discourse in other areas. Not saying that’s not a possibility but heck, LW attracts a fair few cranks anyway.
Mind, I don’t know how possible any of these changes are—I’m only arguing their desirability.
Yeah, I agree that it would be really great if Discussion had subreddits.
There is additionally the point that the ban leads to people compartmentalizing rationalist thought practices from politics. How do you become a rationalist political being if you aren’t able to practice rationalist politics in the supportive company of other rationalists?
“How do you get a clean sewer system if you insist on separating it from the rest of the city?”
I’m having trouble parsing the intended meaning. Can you clarify?
I’m not steven0461, but I’m pretty sure the intended meaning is: Asking for a “rationalist political being” is like asking for a “clean sewer”; it’s a contradiction in terms because politics is fundamentally anti-rational. So when you say “How do you become a rationalist political being if …” you have already made a mistake.
(I don’t think I agree; politics is part of the real world and I see no reason to think that rationalists should never find sufficient reason to become involved. I might agree with the more modest claim that most of us most of the time would do well to pay much less attention to politics than we do.)
There is the obvious counterargument of “Try ignoring your sewer system for a few years and see where it gets you”. I suspect that drowning in shit is not a pleasant experience.
Then steven0461 should taboo “politics” and perhaps for the purposes of this thread replace it with “government policy.”
Maybe. But most of us get to influence government policy mostly via involvement in politics, and if (in someone’s opinion) politics is fundamentally anti-rational then they may conclude that almost all rationalists should try to minimize the time and effort and emotional investment they give to government policy.
But I’m engaging in the usually-futile activity of defending the position of someone else with whom I don’t entirely agree, and who is in fact (I assume) here and able to defend himself. So I’ll stop.
I don’t think LW qualifies as a sufficiently supportive company of rationalists for at least two major reasons: (1) Eugine and his army of sockpuppets, (2) anyone can join, rationalist or not, and talking about politics would most likely attract the wrong kind people, so even if LW would qualify as a sufficiently supportive company of rationalists now, that could easily change overnight.
I imagine that if we could solve the problem of sockpuppets and/or create a system of “trusted users” who could moderate the debate, we would have a chance to debate politics rationally. But I suspect that a rational political debate would be quite boring for most people.
To give an example of “boring politics”, when Trump was elected, half people on internet were posting messages like “that’s great, now Americal will be great again”, half people on internet were posting messages like “that’s horrible, now racists and sexist will be everywhere, and we are all doomed”… and there was a tiny group of people posting messages like “having Trump elected increased value of funds in sectors A, B, C, and decreased value of funds in sectors X, Y, Z, so by hedging against this outcome I made N% money”. You didn’t have to tell these people that rationalists are supposed to bet on their beliefs, because they already did.
Funnily enough, I heard rumors that George Soros placed a big bet on the markets going down after the election and lost very very badly.
I think it is a rather unsympathetic strawman characterization of what they rationalist political debate would be. Even if one could make money off of purely thinking—and I don’t want to debate the efficient market hypothesis here—I would hope that the purpose of the debate would be over rational government policies that address the underlying concerns of all sides. For example, what underlying fears and insecurities lead to support for trumps anti-immigration, anti-Muslim position? What legitimate basis exists, charitably, for these fears? What potential policy could both address these underlying concerns, and be supported by both parties and independents? More to the point, what additional data would be useful to have, in the form of polls that are not currently being conducted or some such?
Nate Silver’s 538 blog is an example of such a rationalist resource, but he only covers politics during election season and there isn’t much community building going on.