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.
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.