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steven0461 comments on Less Wrong Should Confront Wrongness Wherever it Appears - Less Wrong
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I would want to go even further, and strike out (perceived) "importance" as a barrier. Thinking in terms of "importance" will tend to cause our minds to stay within certain topic clusters, when what we actually want is more variety of topics. Rationality lessons are often most illuminating when applied in situations we don't stereotypically think of as illustrating rationality lessons. People may have pet topics or specialized areas of expertise that they would like to post on, but don't because of a fear that their subject isn't "important enough" (which in practice tends to mean being about the topics most commonly discussed here). This is unfortunate, because rationality literally applies everywhere; and I think an aspiring rationalist should seek out as many diverse opportunities for honing their general rationality skills as possible. This will prove useful when it comes to the "important" topics.
On the other hand,
I actually wouldn't want to restrict duplicates to new approaches to the subject itself; I think a new specific lesson on rationality should suffice. Familiarity has its advantages too. (For example, there are a number of Bayesian lessons that I have learned from my study of the Knox case since the original discussion, and I would hope to be able to post in the future on some subset of these, using this particular vivid illustration, without too much objection on the grounds that the topic "has already been done".)
You're misreading jimrandomh, who is proposing that we discuss these non-rationality topics not because (and not only when) they illustrate principles of rationality, but because they are important in their own right. I say that if we adopt a policy like that, we apply it only to the most important topics -- mainly existential risk. Or if the point is to draw people here, to anything sufficiently shiny.
I'm saying that there really aren't any "non-rationality topics" (i.e. a post on any topic can be a post about rationality) and that, insofar as one believes (as I do) that raising the general level of sanity is among the most important goals there are, it is to our benefit (with respect to that important goal) to encourage a wide range of contributions and not be too restrictive or cliquey about topics.
To exactly what extent jimrandomh agrees, I don't know, but this thought was prompted by his post.
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.