The fact that “Politics is the Mind-Killer” doesn’t call for a blanket ban on political discussion doesn’t mean that a community norm against nonessential political discussion is necessarily a bad idea. Now, I would say that roystgnr’s jumping the gun a bit here—the OP’s tied pretty closely to heuristics and biases research, and avoids explicit color politics—but I’d rather we engage the norm on its own terms rather than in terms of its relation to Eliezer’s post. After all, we’re hardly bound to take Eliezer’s word as gospel.
Ok sure I can agree with this, even if I think Overcoming Bias/LessWrong used to be more interesting when we stuck to EY’s proposed norm. But come now you must know of what I’m talking about when I say:
It has now been applied to everything from biology, sociology, sexuality and even recently to religion.
There has been overreach. Worse politics as the mindkiller is now being used as a political tool.
Yeah. There are a number of meta-level concerns here that complicate the problem, but at the object level the difficulty is that our present attitude towards politics creates an unstable equilibrium: there are politically charged topics that can and should be discussed with the LW toolkit, but there’s a pretty strong tendency to go beyond those tools and into unproductive sparring, and no good way to stop it.
I’m for the mind-killer meme insofar as it provides a way to put on the brakes before discussion gets to that point. But I don’t think it’s actually very good at that, especially since there’s the potential for it to be used as a bludgeon against political viewpoints individual posters don’t agree with (those they do, of course, register as common sense rather than ideology). Banning politics altogether is one way to deal with this, hence the norm creep; and it really does need to be dealt with. But I’d like to see a better approach.
The fact that “Politics is the Mind-Killer” doesn’t call for a blanket ban on political discussion doesn’t mean that a community norm against nonessential political discussion is necessarily a bad idea. Now, I would say that roystgnr’s jumping the gun a bit here—the OP’s tied pretty closely to heuristics and biases research, and avoids explicit color politics—but I’d rather we engage the norm on its own terms rather than in terms of its relation to Eliezer’s post. After all, we’re hardly bound to take Eliezer’s word as gospel.
Ok sure I can agree with this, even if I think Overcoming Bias/LessWrong used to be more interesting when we stuck to EY’s proposed norm. But come now you must know of what I’m talking about when I say:
There has been overreach. Worse politics as the mindkiller is now being used as a political tool.
Yeah. There are a number of meta-level concerns here that complicate the problem, but at the object level the difficulty is that our present attitude towards politics creates an unstable equilibrium: there are politically charged topics that can and should be discussed with the LW toolkit, but there’s a pretty strong tendency to go beyond those tools and into unproductive sparring, and no good way to stop it.
I’m for the mind-killer meme insofar as it provides a way to put on the brakes before discussion gets to that point. But I don’t think it’s actually very good at that, especially since there’s the potential for it to be used as a bludgeon against political viewpoints individual posters don’t agree with (those they do, of course, register as common sense rather than ideology). Banning politics altogether is one way to deal with this, hence the norm creep; and it really does need to be dealt with. But I’d like to see a better approach.