I’m not sure if I agree with banning it entirely. There are culture-war-y discussions that seem relevant to LW 2.0: for instance, people might want to talk about sexism in the rationality community, free speech norms, particular flawed studies that touch on some culture-war issue, dating advice, whether EAs should endorse politically controversial causes, nuclear war as existential risk, etc.
OTOH a policy that people should post this sort of content on their own private blogs seems sensible. There are definite merits in favor of banning culture war things. In addition to what you mention, it’s hard to create a consensus about what a “good” culture war discussion is. To pick a fairly neutral example, my blog Thing of Things bans neoreactionaries on sight while Slate Star Codex bans the word in the hopes of limiting the amount they take over discussion; the average neoreactionary, of course, would strongly object to this discriminatory policy.
I think—I hope—we could discuss most of those without getting into the more culture war-y parts, if there were sufficiently strong norms against culture war discussions in general.
Maybe just opt-in rather than opt-out would be sufficient, though. That is, you could explicitly choose to allow CW discussions on your post, but they’d be prohibited by default.
I’m not sure if I agree with banning it entirely. There are culture-war-y discussions that seem relevant to LW 2.0: for instance, people might want to talk about sexism in the rationality community, free speech norms, particular flawed studies that touch on some culture-war issue, dating advice, whether EAs should endorse politically controversial causes, nuclear war as existential risk, etc.
OTOH a policy that people should post this sort of content on their own private blogs seems sensible. There are definite merits in favor of banning culture war things. In addition to what you mention, it’s hard to create a consensus about what a “good” culture war discussion is. To pick a fairly neutral example, my blog Thing of Things bans neoreactionaries on sight while Slate Star Codex bans the word in the hopes of limiting the amount they take over discussion; the average neoreactionary, of course, would strongly object to this discriminatory policy.
I think—I hope—we could discuss most of those without getting into the more culture war-y parts, if there were sufficiently strong norms against culture war discussions in general.
Maybe just opt-in rather than opt-out would be sufficient, though. That is, you could explicitly choose to allow CW discussions on your post, but they’d be prohibited by default.