Biology, sociology, sexuality, and religion are near-completely dominated by political thinking, especially religion which is basically the same thing as politics. (E.g., I have serious doubts about the standard Darwinian account of complex adaptations, but I can’t talk about those doubts for the same reasons I can’t talk about my opinions on climate science.) Given what I’ve seen of your comments I’d have thought this would be obvious to you. LessWrong doesn’t seem to recognize it. I don’t care whether anti-politics norms are praised or demonized, but I do wish they were applied reflectively and consistently in any case.
I do wish they were applied reflectively and consistently in any case.
Sure, me too. While I’m at it, I have other implausible wishes I’d love to have granted.
In the meantime, I generally assume that whenever an organization has a “let’s not talk about X because that always leads to unproductive/unpleasant discussions” norm (which is usually), there’s a space of privileged positions about X implicit in the resulting conversations which cannot be challenged.
The problem, one thinks, occasionally, in the abstract of Far mode, is that some kinds of politics tend to drag our identities into them, such that if we were wrong about something, then we were the wrong person, and that is absolutely unacceptable. This does not seem to actually happen with biology or sociology so much. So I guess the REAL policy is against one of discussing politics you identify with?
Biology, sociology, sexuality, and religion are near-completely dominated by political thinking, especially religion which is basically the same thing as politics. (E.g., I have serious doubts about the standard Darwinian account of complex adaptations, but I can’t talk about those doubts for the same reasons I can’t talk about my opinions on climate science.) Given what I’ve seen of your comments I’d have thought this would be obvious to you. LessWrong doesn’t seem to recognize it. I don’t care whether anti-politics norms are praised or demonized, but I do wish they were applied reflectively and consistently in any case.
Yeah I guess you are right. At the end of the day I just want talking about markets to be OK on LessWrong.
Sorry. (^_^)
Sure, me too.
While I’m at it, I have other implausible wishes I’d love to have granted.
In the meantime, I generally assume that whenever an organization has a “let’s not talk about X because that always leads to unproductive/unpleasant discussions” norm (which is usually), there’s a space of privileged positions about X implicit in the resulting conversations which cannot be challenged.
The problem, one thinks, occasionally, in the abstract of Far mode, is that some kinds of politics tend to drag our identities into them, such that if we were wrong about something, then we were the wrong person, and that is absolutely unacceptable. This does not seem to actually happen with biology or sociology so much. So I guess the REAL policy is against one of discussing politics you identify with?