"Arguments are soldiers" is practically the definition of democracy. In theory, if my arguments are persuasive enough it will determine whether or not my neighbors or I can continue doing X or start doing Y without being fined, jailed, or killed for it. Depending on what great things I like to do or what horrible things I want to prevent my neighbors from doing, that's an awfully powerful incentive for me to risk a few minds being killed.
Now, in practice we mostly live in near-megaperson cities in multi-megaperson districts of near-gigaperson countries, whereas my above theory mostly applies to hectoperson and kiloperson tribes. But my ape brain can't quite internalize that, so the subconscious incentive remains.
But that's not even the worst of it! I try to read a range of liberal, conservative, libertarian, populist etc. news and commentary, just so that the gaps in each don't overlap so much... but it requires a conscious effort. Judging by the groupthink in reader comments on these sites, most people's behavior is the opposite of mine. Why not? Reading about how right you are is fun; reading about how wrong you are is not.
It would be very easy for new would-be LessWrong readers to see the politics threads, jump to conclusions like "Oh, these people think they're so smart but they're actually a bunch of Blues! A wise Green like me should look elsewhere for rationality." Repeat for a few years and the average LessWrong biases really do start to skew Blue, even bad Blue-associated ideas start going unchallenged, etc.
I think I would still love to read what LessWrong users have to say about politics. Probably on a different site. With unconnected karma and preferably unconnected pseudonyms.
Seconded on the different site, unconnected karma and unconnected pseudonyms. Also, it'd be nice if it could somehow be somewhat dissociated from LW... might be useful to have a link to it easily visible, actually, but if there is one it should be right next to a specification explaining the idea and linking to "politics is the mind-killer".
Separately, the idea of retaining a taboo on things like discussing politicians or the like, and restricting it to mostly issue discussions, also sounds useful.
Summary: I propose we somewhat relax our stance on political speech on Less Wrong.
Related: The mind-killer, Mind-killer
A recent series of posts by a well-meaning troll (example) has caused me to re-examine our "no-politics" norm. I believe there has been some unintentional creep from the original intent of Politics is the Mind-Killer. In that article, Eliezer is arguing that discussions here (actually on Overcoming Bias) should not use examples from politics in discussions that are not about politics, since they distract from the lesson. Note the final paragraph:
So, the original intent was not to ban political speech altogether, but to encourage us to come up with less-charged examples where possible. If the subject you're really talking about is politics, and it relates directly to rationality, then you should be able to post about it without getting downvotes strictly because "politics is the mind-killer".
It could be that this drift is less of a community norm than I perceive, and there are just a few folks (myself included) that have taken the original message too far. If so, consider this a message just to those folks such as myself.
Of course, politics would still be off-topic in the comment threads of most posts. There should probably be a special open thread (or another forum) to which drive-by political activists can be directed, instead of simply saying "We don't talk about politics here".
David_Gerard makes a similar point here (though FWIW, I came up with this title independently).