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CuSithBell comments on Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians - Less Wrong
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I think you're being a little unfair to brazil84's comment. Adding a woman to a men-only group affects all (edit: many, not all) men because they feel an impulse to compete for her. A gay guy won't cause this reaction.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Some mixed gender groups do have downsides, which may be important to some people. In my experience, being in a group with many males and few females feels slightly less comfortable than either an all-male group or an evenly mixed group.
Yes, the vast majority of debates in the space of possible policy debates should appear one-sided.
Except the policy debates that actually come up in real life are not drawn uniformly from the space of all policy debates. The one-sided issues are typically not worth mentioning, simply because they are one-sided.
Exactly. Another way to put it would be - policy debates should not appear one-sided, so long as you do not consider all proposals about policy to constitute policy debates.
("PDSNAOS" does not mean "people don't have bad ideas")
"One-sided", as I understand it, doesn't mean that, on net, one side wins by a comfortable margin; it means all the arguments go the same way.
Well, if we're being picky: for all natural numbers n, let P(n) be the proposal "all future policy decisions should be decided by a sack containing n potatoes".
I meant that as saying all the considerations for deciding any given issue go the same way, not all issues to be decided go the same way.
Right, but there really aren't any good arguments for adopting P(n) for any n - none worth considering, at least. And that's a countably infinite number of policy debates that we don't need to have!
But that's an example of "wins by a comfortable margin", not "all the arguments go the same way". For example, P(n) is cheap to implement for low n.
No cheaper than leaving out the sack and the potatoes. Do you really think that there are any benefits of P(n) for any n that would justify having a debate over it? I think all the arguments go the same way for sufficiently small values of "all" - that is, it's "one-sided" enough that it shouldn't even be brought up.
One reason to bring up argument X against policy P when policy P is clearly better is that there might be a slight modification of P that retains the advantages of P while addressing argument X.