We could certainly encourage more discussion of the political virtues on Less Wrong - I'm talking about general concepts like mediation or compromise - and this would definitely help forestall the factionalization of Less Wrong's userbase.
However, it would be a grave mistake to encourage "base level" political discussions on Less Wrong itself: that part should be left to specialized open politics websites, which often need to include such features as argumentation frameworks, support for clearly-defined factions, acceptance of anonymous input etc.
We could certainly encourage more discussion of the political virtues on Less Wrong - I'm talking about general concepts like mediation or compromise
Agreed.
However, it would be a grave mistake to encourage "base level" political discussions on Less Wrong itself:
yes, exactly.
It seems that LessWrong has a nascent political problem brewing. Firstly, let me re-iterate why politics is bad for our rationality:
Politics is especially bad for the community if people begin to form political factions within the community. Specifically, if LessWrong starts to polarize along a "feminist/masculinist" fault-line, then every subsequent debate will become a proxy war for the crusade between the masculinist jerks and the femenazis.
Alicorn has contributed in several ways to the emerging politicization of LessWrong. She has started name-calling against the other side ("Jerkitude" "disincentivize being piggish"), started to attempt to form a political band of feminist allies ("So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support,"), implicitly asked these new allies to downvote anyone who disagrees with her position ("There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems"), and asks her faction to begin enforcing her ideas, specifically by criticising, ostracizing or downvoting anyone who engages in a perfectly standard use of langage and thought: modeling the generic human female as a mechanical system and using that model to make predictions about reality. She has billed this effort as a moral crusade ("unethical"). I am sure she isn't doing this on purpose: like all humans, her brain is hard-wired to see any argument as a moral crusade where she is objectively right, and to seek allies within the tribe to move against and oppress the enemy. [notice how I objectified her there, leaving behind the language of a unified self or person in favour of a collection of mechanical motivations and processes whose dynamics are partially determined by evolutionary pressures, and what a useful exercise this can be for making sense of reality]
We should expend extreme effort to nip this problem in the bud. As part of this effort, I will delete my account and re-register under a different username. I would recommend that Alicorn do the same. I would also recommend that anyone who feels that they have played a particularly large part in the debate on either side do the same, for example PJeby. That way, when we talk to each other next in a comment thread, we won't be treating the interaction as a proxy war in the great feminist/masculinist crusade, because we will be anonymous again.
I would also implore everyone to just not bring this issue up again. If someone uses language in a way that mildly annoys you (hint: they probably didn't do this on purpose), rather than precipitating a major community feud over it, just ignore it. The epistemic rationality of LessWrong is worth more than the gender ratio we have. A 95% male community that manages to overcome a whole host of problems in instrumental and epistemic rationality is worth more to the world than a 80% male community that is crippled by a blood-feud between a feminist faction and a masculinist faction.