It seems to be working okay with regards to Covid policy and Ukraine stuff, which is very heavily politicized. I’d expect perhaps a few nasty comments, but my (perhaps naïve) assumption is that it would be possible to discuss that sort of thing here in a relatively mature manner.
Those things are politicized, but there’s a ground-truth behind them, and most of the discussion is driven by a few well-respected posters doing a LOT of great work to keep it primarily factual and not give much weight to the political side of things (while recognizing the pain caused by the fact that it’s politicized).
I don’t believe that treatment is possible with culture-war topics, which are political through and through. I also don’t expect any long-time prolific community member (who understands the somewhat mutable boundaries of what’s useful here and what’s not) to take up the topic.
Also, those series started as linkposts to outside blogs, and the LW mods decided to promote and encourage them. This is a GREAT pattern to follow for topics you think might work well, but aren’t sure—post them on your own forum where you’re used to having full freedom of topic and see how people will react there, then link one or two of the best ones here to see how it goes.
I agree that a topic like abortion by default doesn’t fit well on LW. However, I could imagine some posts about abortion might be okay on LW (but wouldn’t get on the frontpage, I’m guessing, because they’d be too at risk of triggering political fights). For example, a post analyzing various abortion policies and what effects they have without making a strong policy recommendation (or making multiple policy recommendations based on what objectives one is trying to achieve) would probably be fine and interesting. A post about how [terrible thing] will befall [group x] as a result of changes to US abortion policy would probably end up too political.
One aspect of the topic I would be interested in is expected long-term effects on population growth rates, potential movements/migrations as a result, etc. I’d expect there to be some data on the topic if other nations have done anything similar in the past, and while I don’t feel qualified to analyze such topics in any depth, I can imagine it being handled well.
It seems to be working okay with regards to Covid policy and Ukraine stuff, which is very heavily politicized. I’d expect perhaps a few nasty comments, but my (perhaps naïve) assumption is that it would be possible to discuss that sort of thing here in a relatively mature manner.
Those things are politicized, but there’s a ground-truth behind them, and most of the discussion is driven by a few well-respected posters doing a LOT of great work to keep it primarily factual and not give much weight to the political side of things (while recognizing the pain caused by the fact that it’s politicized).
I don’t believe that treatment is possible with culture-war topics, which are political through and through. I also don’t expect any long-time prolific community member (who understands the somewhat mutable boundaries of what’s useful here and what’s not) to take up the topic.
Also, those series started as linkposts to outside blogs, and the LW mods decided to promote and encourage them. This is a GREAT pattern to follow for topics you think might work well, but aren’t sure—post them on your own forum where you’re used to having full freedom of topic and see how people will react there, then link one or two of the best ones here to see how it goes.
I agree that a topic like abortion by default doesn’t fit well on LW. However, I could imagine some posts about abortion might be okay on LW (but wouldn’t get on the frontpage, I’m guessing, because they’d be too at risk of triggering political fights). For example, a post analyzing various abortion policies and what effects they have without making a strong policy recommendation (or making multiple policy recommendations based on what objectives one is trying to achieve) would probably be fine and interesting. A post about how [terrible thing] will befall [group x] as a result of changes to US abortion policy would probably end up too political.
One aspect of the topic I would be interested in is expected long-term effects on population growth rates, potential movements/migrations as a result, etc. I’d expect there to be some data on the topic if other nations have done anything similar in the past, and while I don’t feel qualified to analyze such topics in any depth, I can imagine it being handled well.
I think there are ways to treat those kind of topics in a productive way (through ideological Turing tests for example).