A post on any topic can be a post about rationality if you put in specific work to make it so; I read jimrandomh as saying there’s no need to put in such work.
Your reading may be the intended one; we’ll have to await jimrandomh’s clarification. Meanwhile, the following paragraph is what led me to believe that jimrandomh is not actually proposing a change in topic policy:
Less Wrong does not currently provide strong guidance about what is considered on topic. In fact, Less Wrong generally considers topic to be secondary to importance and clarity, and this is as it should be. However, this should be formally acknowledged, so that people are not discouraged from posting important things just because they think they might be off topic! Determining whether something is on topic is a trivial inconvenience of the worst sort.
The posting policies of Less Wrong are effectively determined by up- and downvoting and by commenting, which means that everyone can have their own ideas about what those policies are. Whether my proposal agrees with the current policy or not depends on what you think the current policy is, and that’s unclear. My intention is to clarify it in the way I think gives the highest utility. I don’t think it substantially disagrees with the policies currently enforced as indicated by voting.
Not exactly; I ask people to call out the problems commonly impairing the rationality of other discussions of the topic, to help avoid them, and including that explanation would make any article at least a little bit “about rationality”. However, the justification for including the connection to rationality is to protect the quality of the conversation, not to satisfy an “is on-topic” requirement.
Fair enough; still, I feel most people underestimate how radical a change it is from “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality” to “a community blog devoted to providing correct analysis on important subjects, informed by previous writings on the art of human rationality, and maybe refining that art a little bit as a side effect”.
We seem to have a mix of pure and applied reasoning topics. It would be bad if we lost one of those categories, or if the ratio got too far out of wack. Since we accept posts on lots of random important subjects, any effects that letting random important subjects in might have have already happened, and they clearly weren’t disastrous.
A post on any topic can be a post about rationality if you put in specific work to make it so; I read jimrandomh as saying there’s no need to put in such work.
Your reading may be the intended one; we’ll have to await jimrandomh’s clarification. Meanwhile, the following paragraph is what led me to believe that jimrandomh is not actually proposing a change in topic policy:
The posting policies of Less Wrong are effectively determined by up- and downvoting and by commenting, which means that everyone can have their own ideas about what those policies are. Whether my proposal agrees with the current policy or not depends on what you think the current policy is, and that’s unclear. My intention is to clarify it in the way I think gives the highest utility. I don’t think it substantially disagrees with the policies currently enforced as indicated by voting.
Not exactly; I ask people to call out the problems commonly impairing the rationality of other discussions of the topic, to help avoid them, and including that explanation would make any article at least a little bit “about rationality”. However, the justification for including the connection to rationality is to protect the quality of the conversation, not to satisfy an “is on-topic” requirement.
Fair enough; still, I feel most people underestimate how radical a change it is from “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality” to “a community blog devoted to providing correct analysis on important subjects, informed by previous writings on the art of human rationality, and maybe refining that art a little bit as a side effect”.
We seem to have a mix of pure and applied reasoning topics. It would be bad if we lost one of those categories, or if the ratio got too far out of wack. Since we accept posts on lots of random important subjects, any effects that letting random important subjects in might have have already happened, and they clearly weren’t disastrous.