I think there are many interesting things to say about politics. (I’ve got a few sitting in my draft folder too.) But it’s a bit of a slippery slope. In the SSC subreddit, the politics thread gets more content than all the rest combined, by far. If they had a “recent comments” feed, it would be pretty much useless for anything except politics. We probably don’t want that to happen on LW2.0, so I’d like to see a specific plan from mods that will prevent that from happening. For example, a blanket rule of “no politics ever” could be a good idea. Or it could be less heavy-handed than that. But we need a plan! Otherwise political arguments will drown out the rest.
Current plan is that we will move anything political off the frontpage, and hide the comments on it from the frontpage (the second part is not yet technically implemented). Stuff in the personal blog section does get significantly less engagement, and if we ever notice that the core site experience gets clogged up with low quality stuff from the personal blogs, we would probably continue to decrease the visibility of personal blog content until it’s no longer a problem. This might not yet be enough, but it seems good enough that I think waiting until we see more problems pop up is the correct call.
I’d like a clearer definition of what counts as politics.
Some examples are easy to classify, but this post doesn’t feel that way to me.
There was a recent post about the ethics of eating meat, and earlier posts on EA. Presumably these didn’t count as “politics”. But those two subjects are some of the examples given in the current post, and some of the others are uncontroversial (e.g. boo slavery).
ETA: ChristianKI’s comment does seem clearly more politicised than the OP. But I wouldn’t have predicted the discussion would go there just from reading the OP. And the thread I’m commenting on is older than that comment.
I don’t know what definition of politics the mods will use, but recently I came up with an interesting definition for my own use, and this margin is just wide enough to share it :-)
Basically I think the predicate “is it political?” doesn’t apply to beliefs. All beliefs are value-neutral, even the most controversial ones. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be political or not. Political arguments are based on who benefits and who loses from a belief. As opposed to rational arguments, which are based on evidence about the belief’s truth or falsity.
Examples:
“Views like yours have been historically used to justify horrible things, so I’d like to civilly ask you to consider the connotations”—political argument, makes life worse for everyone
“You’re a fucking moron, google this study by Joe Scientist that says your braindead opinion is incompatible with basic facts”—rational argument, makes life better for everyone
This is slightly exaggerated, but close to what I actually believe. Or at least I can breathe easily in a group of people talking like #2, while remarks like #1 feel like a poisonous fog to me even coming from my side.
Though I’m not sure I’d adopt this as a norm for moderation. Some beliefs seem to attract political arguments so strongly that it’s easier to just stop people from discussing them here.
Thanks! I’m trying to return to a more active commenting lifestyle.
Yours is a reasonable definition of “is it political?” but I think it’s a very different sense from that which was forbidden on LW 1.0, as I understood it. The idea there was to avoid discussing any subject that was a live political debate (implicitly: in the US), because those are the debates that seemed most likely to become mindkilling.
So it was fine to say slavery and Nazism are bad, because (in the US) these are politically settled subjects, even though they’re very political in themselves. And it was also fine to argue for very far-outside-the-mainstream ideas like UBI or cryonics, because they are so fringe that there’s no politically or culturally active movement attacking them. But it probably wouldn’t be fine to argue about abortion rights or open borders.
I think there are many interesting things to say about politics. (I’ve got a few sitting in my draft folder too.) But it’s a bit of a slippery slope. In the SSC subreddit, the politics thread gets more content than all the rest combined, by far. If they had a “recent comments” feed, it would be pretty much useless for anything except politics. We probably don’t want that to happen on LW2.0, so I’d like to see a specific plan from mods that will prevent that from happening. For example, a blanket rule of “no politics ever” could be a good idea. Or it could be less heavy-handed than that. But we need a plan! Otherwise political arguments will drown out the rest.
Current plan is that we will move anything political off the frontpage, and hide the comments on it from the frontpage (the second part is not yet technically implemented). Stuff in the personal blog section does get significantly less engagement, and if we ever notice that the core site experience gets clogged up with low quality stuff from the personal blogs, we would probably continue to decrease the visibility of personal blog content until it’s no longer a problem. This might not yet be enough, but it seems good enough that I think waiting until we see more problems pop up is the correct call.
I’d like a clearer definition of what counts as politics. Some examples are easy to classify, but this post doesn’t feel that way to me.
There was a recent post about the ethics of eating meat, and earlier posts on EA. Presumably these didn’t count as “politics”. But those two subjects are some of the examples given in the current post, and some of the others are uncontroversial (e.g. boo slavery).
ETA: ChristianKI’s comment does seem clearly more politicised than the OP. But I wouldn’t have predicted the discussion would go there just from reading the OP. And the thread I’m commenting on is older than that comment.
Dan, great to see you on LW2.0!
I don’t know what definition of politics the mods will use, but recently I came up with an interesting definition for my own use, and this margin is just wide enough to share it :-)
Basically I think the predicate “is it political?” doesn’t apply to beliefs. All beliefs are value-neutral, even the most controversial ones. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be political or not. Political arguments are based on who benefits and who loses from a belief. As opposed to rational arguments, which are based on evidence about the belief’s truth or falsity.
Examples:
“Views like yours have been historically used to justify horrible things, so I’d like to civilly ask you to consider the connotations”—political argument, makes life worse for everyone
“You’re a fucking moron, google this study by Joe Scientist that says your braindead opinion is incompatible with basic facts”—rational argument, makes life better for everyone
This is slightly exaggerated, but close to what I actually believe. Or at least I can breathe easily in a group of people talking like #2, while remarks like #1 feel like a poisonous fog to me even coming from my side.
Though I’m not sure I’d adopt this as a norm for moderation. Some beliefs seem to attract political arguments so strongly that it’s easier to just stop people from discussing them here.
Thanks! I’m trying to return to a more active commenting lifestyle.
Yours is a reasonable definition of “is it political?” but I think it’s a very different sense from that which was forbidden on LW 1.0, as I understood it. The idea there was to avoid discussing any subject that was a live political debate (implicitly: in the US), because those are the debates that seemed most likely to become mindkilling.
So it was fine to say slavery and Nazism are bad, because (in the US) these are politically settled subjects, even though they’re very political in themselves. And it was also fine to argue for very far-outside-the-mainstream ideas like UBI or cryonics, because they are so fringe that there’s no politically or culturally active movement attacking them. But it probably wouldn’t be fine to argue about abortion rights or open borders.