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Kaj_Sotala comments on Mental Metadata - Less Wrong
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Sometimes you also need to be careful not to specify too much background for the question. Suppose you want to evaluate a controversial hypothesis by asking a simple, non-controversial factual question. Then what you want to do is to just ask the factual question, without connecting it to the controversial hypothesis. Otherwise people will end up debating the controversial hypothesis and never answer the actual question you were interested in.
This not only happened to me recently, but also expanded to a flamewar elsewhere. I should've just asked "what gender ratios have you observed".
Obviously this is more of an issue in online forum-type conversations, but I've also observed in one-to-one conversations.
The LiveJournal community seems to really like its recreational outrage.
Did any useful communication happen on that second thread? It looks like an epic identity politics circle jerk.
No, not really.
It wasn't quite as bad as the one time a message board decided I was a fundamentalist nut because I had the audacity to suggest that religion may also have benefits (even if those were possibly outweighed by the harms). But I did get a similar "it doesn't really matter what you say, we've already decided to interpret it in the worst possible way regardless" vibe.
Related article from the sequences: Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided.