If your forum has a lot of smart people, and they read the recommended readings, then the more people who participate in the forum, the smarter the forum will be. If the forum doesn't have a lot of stupid, belligerent rules that make participation difficult, then it will attract people who like to post. If those people aren't discouraged from posting, but are discouraged from posting stupid things, your forum will trend toward intelligence (law of large numbers, emergence with many brains) and away from being an echo chamber (law of small numbers, emergence with few brains).
I wouldn't stay up late at night worrying about how to get people to up-vote or down-vote things. They won't listen anyway, but even so, they might contain a significant amount of the wisdom found in "the Sequences," and wisdom from other places, too. They might even contain wisdom from the personal experiences of people on the blue and green teams, who then can contribute to the experiential wisdom of the Lesswrong crowd, even without being philosophically-aware participants, and even with their comments being disdained and down-voted.
If your forum has a lot of smart people, and they read the recommended readings, then the more people who participate in the forum, the smarter the forum will be.
If the forum can be said to have an intelligence which is equal to the sum of its parts, or even just some additive function of its parts, then yes. But this is not reliably the case; agents within a group can produce antagonistic effects on each others' output, leading to the group collectively being "dumber" than its individual members.
...If those people aren't discouraged from posti
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).