My interpretation could be summarized in similar fashion as “really, really, don’t talk about politics on LessWrong”—whether this is “consistent” or not depends on your definition of that word.
I agree with your interpretation of the point of the story… and with pretty much everything else you wrote in this comment, which I guess leaves me with little else to say.
Although, that’s an example of another issue with political forums, isn’t it? In an academic setting, if a speaker elicits informed agreement from the audience about their subject, that means we’ve all got more shared foundational material with which to build the discussion of a closely related subsequent topic. Difficult questions without obvious unanimous answers do get reached eventually, but only after enough simpler related problems have been solved to make the hard questions tractable.
Politics instead turns into debates, where discussions shut down once agreement occurs, then derail onto the less tractable topics where disagreement is most heated. Where would we be if Newton had decided “Yeah, Kepler’s laws seem accurate; let me just write “me too” and then we’re on to weather prediction!”
My interpretation could be summarized in similar fashion as “really, really, don’t talk about politics on LessWrong”—whether this is “consistent” or not depends on your definition of that word.
I agree with your interpretation of the point of the story… and with pretty much everything else you wrote in this comment, which I guess leaves me with little else to say.
Although, that’s an example of another issue with political forums, isn’t it? In an academic setting, if a speaker elicits informed agreement from the audience about their subject, that means we’ve all got more shared foundational material with which to build the discussion of a closely related subsequent topic. Difficult questions without obvious unanimous answers do get reached eventually, but only after enough simpler related problems have been solved to make the hard questions tractable.
Politics instead turns into debates, where discussions shut down once agreement occurs, then derail onto the less tractable topics where disagreement is most heated. Where would we be if Newton had decided “Yeah, Kepler’s laws seem accurate; let me just write “me too” and then we’re on to weather prediction!”