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David_Gerard comments on Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (240)
An outside view of LessWrong:
As far as I can tell, the reason for this is that in practical matters, "politics is the mind killer" is the mind killer.
Is there an argument behind "quotidian" besides "I have a short mental time horizon and don't like to think weird thoughts"?
Why would LessWrong be able to come to a consensus on political subjects? Who would care about such a consensus if it came about?
There's already enough geek-libertarian atmosphere that those of us who aren't really notice it. But yeah - as I said, I'm not actually sure it would be a good idea. But the shying away from practical application to that particular part of things people are actually interested in fixing in their daily lives is a noteworthy absence.
Your implied claim that quotidian thoughts are unworthy of attention is ... look, if you want to convince people all of this is actually a good idea, then when someone asks "so, OK. What are the practical applications of reading a million words of philosophy and learning probability maths?", answering "How dare you be so short-termist" strikes me as unlikely to work. I mean, I could be wrong ...
If it is not too much trouble, could you explain further what you mean by that?
It seems to be treated as a thought stopper. "Do not go beyond this point." There are good reasons for it, but the behaviour looks just like shying away from a bad thought.
The thoughts are there, they're just not expressed on this particular site.
I always assumed it was more a discussion-stopper, meant to keep people polite and quiet. However, your interpretation is probably better.
I assume that was the intention. I'm not actually convinced that it would improve the site for us to dive headfirst into politics ... but it's odd for the stuff discussed here not to be applied even somewhere else, or even in the discussion section, without a flurry of downvotes. There's a strong social norm that even the slightest hint of political discussion is inherently bad and must be avoided.
It should be noted that RationalWiki is not a website known to be, let us say, lacking in killed minds.
It is a very silly place.
I agree