Besides decision theory and AI cooperation, I mean things like better understanding of biases and ways to counteract them (see most posts in Top Posts). Ethics and other rationality-related philosophy (Are wireheads happy?). Ways to encourage/improve rational discussions. Ways to make probability/decision theory more intuitive/useful/relevant in practice.
It might be that we got into a misunderstanding because we mean different things when we speak about “soft” areas. To me, the topics you listed except for the first two ones, and the posts that exemplify them, look like they could be reasonably described as addressing (either directly or indirectly) various soft fields where the conventional wisdom is dubious, disorganized, and contradictory. Therefore, what you list can be seen as a subset of the soft topics I had in mind, rather than something altogether different.
To support this, I would note that most of the top posts bring up issues (including some ideologically sensitive ones) about which much has been written by prominent academics and other mainstream intellectual figures but in a pre-paradigmatic way, that ethics and philosophy are clear examples of soft fields, and that improvements in the understanding of biases achieved in LW discussions are extremely unlikely to be useful for people in hard fields who already use sophisticated and effective area-specific bias-eliminating methodologies, but they could lead to non-trivial insight in various soft topics (and the highest-scoring top posts have indeed applied them to soft topics, not hard ones).
So, on the whole, the only disagreement we seem to have (if any) is about what specific range of soft topics should be encouraged as the subject of discussions here.
Besides decision theory and AI cooperation, I mean things like better understanding of biases and ways to counteract them (see most posts in Top Posts). Ethics and other rationality-related philosophy (Are wireheads happy?). Ways to encourage/improve rational discussions. Ways to make probability/decision theory more intuitive/useful/relevant in practice.
It might be that we got into a misunderstanding because we mean different things when we speak about “soft” areas. To me, the topics you listed except for the first two ones, and the posts that exemplify them, look like they could be reasonably described as addressing (either directly or indirectly) various soft fields where the conventional wisdom is dubious, disorganized, and contradictory. Therefore, what you list can be seen as a subset of the soft topics I had in mind, rather than something altogether different.
To support this, I would note that most of the top posts bring up issues (including some ideologically sensitive ones) about which much has been written by prominent academics and other mainstream intellectual figures but in a pre-paradigmatic way, that ethics and philosophy are clear examples of soft fields, and that improvements in the understanding of biases achieved in LW discussions are extremely unlikely to be useful for people in hard fields who already use sophisticated and effective area-specific bias-eliminating methodologies, but they could lead to non-trivial insight in various soft topics (and the highest-scoring top posts have indeed applied them to soft topics, not hard ones).
So, on the whole, the only disagreement we seem to have (if any) is about what specific range of soft topics should be encouraged as the subject of discussions here.