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thomblake comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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You are presenting the situation as if such hints were coming out of the blue in discussions of unrelated topics. In reality, however, I have seen (or given) such hints only in situations where a problematic topic has already been opened and discussed by others. In such situations, the commenter giving the hint is faced with a very unpleasant choice, where each option has very serious downsides. It seems to me that the optimal choice in some situations is to announce clearly that the topic is in fact deeply problematic, and there is no way to have a no-holds-barred rational discussion about it that wouldn't offend some sensibilities. (And thus even if it doesn't break down the discourse here, it would make the forum look bad to the outside world.)
At the very least, this can have the beneficial effect of lowering people's confidence in the biased conclusions of the existing discussion, thus making their beliefs more accurate, even in a purely reactive way. However, you seem to deny that this choice could ever be optimal. Yet I really don't see how you can write off the possibility that both alternatives -- either staying silent or expressing controversial opinions about highly charged issues openly -- can sometimes lead to worse results by some reasonable measure.
You also seem to think that merely phrasing your opinion in polite, detached, and intellectual-sounding terms is enough to avoid the dangers of bad signaling inherent to certain topics. I think this is mistaken. It might lead to the topic in question being discussed rationally on LW -- and in fact, this will likely happen on LW unless the topic is gender-related and if it manages to elicit interest -- but it definitely won't escape censure by the outside world.
This.
I really really don't want such discussion to be very prominent, because they attract the wrong contrarian cluster. But I don't want LW loosing ground rationality wise with debates that are based on some silly premises, especially ones that are continually reinforced by new arrivals and happy death spirals!
Attracting the wrong people, and alienating some of the "right" people is a bigger concern to me than the reputation of the site as a whole (though that counts too). Another concern is that hot-button issues might eat up the conversations and get too important (they are not issues I care that much about debating here).
The current compromise of avoiding some hot-button issue, and having some controversial things buried in comment threads or couched in indirect academese seems reasonable enough to me.
I agree with this. But I wish to emphasise:
Some of us look at the state of LW and fear that punishment of this appropriate behaviour is slowly escalating, while evaporative cooling is eliminating the rewards.
I concur with this diagnosis -- and I would add that the process has already led to some huge happy death spirals of a sort that would not be allowed to develop, say, a year an a half ago when I first started commenting here. In some cases, the situation has become so bad that attacking these death spirals head-on is no longer feasible without looking like a quarrelsome and disruptive troll.
Could you give some examples? I don't like the thought of my brain being happy-death-spiralled without my noticing. I promise to upvote your comment even if it makes me angry.
(Eh, he's been inactive for the last three months anyway.)
Which is I think the current situation when it comes to criticism of say democracy.
Actually, general criticism of democracy isn't such a big problem. It can make you look wacky and eccentric, but it's unlikely to get you categorized among the truly evil people who must be consistently fought and ostracized by all decent persons. There are even some respectable academic and scholarly ways to trash democracy, most notably the public choice theory.
Criticisms of democracy are really dangerous only when they touch (directly or by clear implication) on some of the central great taboos. Of course, respectable scholars who take aim at democracy would never dare touch any of these with a ten foot pole, which necessarily takes most teeth out of their criticism.
I think criticism of democracy goes over less well if you have something specific that you want to replace it with.
That is true, but you get into truly dangerous territory once you drop the implicit assumption that your criticism applies to democracy in all places and times, and start analyzing what exactly correlates with it functioning better or worse.
I expect it depends on what distinctions you're using for what corelates with how democracies do. For example, claiming that there's an optimal size for democracies that's smaller than a lot of existing countries could get contentious, but I don't think it would blow up as hard as what I suspect you're thinking of.
Yes, of course, my above characterization was imprecise in this regard.
As a potshot, let's just fucking spell it out: genetics, and "Race" in particularly.