Konkvistador comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong

48 Post author: lukeprog 05 November 2011 11:06AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 06 November 2011 10:10:17AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Which is I think the current situation when it comes to criticism of say democracy.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 06 November 2011 10:45:10PM *  7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 07 November 2011 01:16:40AM 10 points [-]

I think criticism of democracy goes over less well if you have something specific that you want to replace it with.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 07 November 2011 03:42:48AM 10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 07 November 2011 03:48:16AM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 November 2011 01:38:07AM 5 points [-]

I expect it depends on what distinctions you're using for what corelates with how democracies do.

Yes, of course, my above characterization was imprecise in this regard.

Comment author: Multiheaded 28 February 2012 02:33:06AM *  0 points [-]

but I don't think it would blow up as hard as what I suspect you're thinking of.

As a potshot, let's just fucking spell it out: genetics, and "Race" in particularly.

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