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AnnaSalamon comments on Less Wrong Should Confront Wrongness Wherever it Appears - Less Wrong
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I'm inclined to agree with your proposal, but I wonder if there are supplementary community norms that, if made explicit, might make it easier to venture into confusing and polarizing topics without losing LW's usual level of accuracy and of signal to noise. (I assume fear of filling the blog with nonsense, and thereby losing some good readers/commenters, is much of what currently keeps e.g. political discussion off of LW.)
Maybe it would help to have heuristics such as "if you don't have anything clear and obviously correct to say, don't say anything at all", that could be reiterated and enforced when tricky topics come up.
Far from everything on LW is obviously correct.
Yes. I'd meant to suggest a more stringent standard when attempting discussion on topics that are both confusing and polarizing.
Is "obviously" a more stringent standard?
We can confine such topics to appropriate subreddits by an explicit moderation policy. Each such subreddit may have additional, more specific rules and policies (shown in the sidebar, for example.)
Other such suggestions in the comments here.
About half a million comments have appeared so far on LW. How many of those have you voted up or down, Anna?
I am not saying that you should spend a lot of your time voting on LW, but I am more interested in whether those who have voted a lot agree with jimrandomh's proposal.
Like I said a few days ago, I stopped voting about 6 weeks ago, in response to an increase in bad comments. Now I scroll past comments by writers I do not recognize or writers that have annoyed me too often in the past, and my ex-girlfriend no longer complains of my being overly critical or judgmental. (I am pretty sure that the task of judging the "voteworthiness" of comments is what pulled me into the critical/judgmental state, which I find hard to get out of. Perhaps I am unusual in this regard, but the distaste expressed by many academics for reviewing papers suggests that I am not.)
I fear this would reduce LessWrong to referencing research papers. Perhaps there is more value in applying rigor as disagreements emerge. I.e. a process of going from two people flatly disagreeing to establishing criteria to choose between them. I.e. a norm concerning a process for reaching reasonable conclusions on a controversial topic. In this way there would be greater emphasis on turning ambiguous issues into reasonable ones. Which I view as one of the main benefits of rationality.