Let’s say we talk about politics for a while and come up with a concrete proposal. The utility of our work is the product of (utility of proposal if implemented) and (probability of successfully implementing proposal). Even if the first number is very high, the second probability is vanishingly small.
This means that politics is not important as a Less Wrong topic.
Just because there’s always been an explicit ban on it, OP didn’t propose repealing that ban, and none of the examples he cited were explicitly political.
Personally I’m undecided on whether political discussions would be a good idea (they should, at a minimum, be confined to a subreddit imho), I’m just confused why the commenter seemed to think thats what OP meant when he didn’t say anything about it.
Let’s say we talk about politics for a while and come up with a concrete proposal. The utility of our work is the product of (utility of proposal if implemented) and (probability of successfully implementing proposal). Even if the first number is very high, the second probability is vanishingly small.
This means that politics is not important as a Less Wrong topic.
Under your definition of importance, agreed. However, for reasons which are clear from the context, I have used the definition of the original post:
Just because there’s always been an explicit ban on it, OP didn’t propose repealing that ban, and none of the examples he cited were explicitly political.
Personally I’m undecided on whether political discussions would be a good idea (they should, at a minimum, be confined to a subreddit imho), I’m just confused why the commenter seemed to think thats what OP meant when he didn’t say anything about it.