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loup-vaillant comments on How to Fix Science - Less Wrong
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Evolution is also a political issue. Shall we now refrain from talking about evolution, or mentioning what widespread refusal to accept evolution, up to the point of there being a strong movement to undermine the teaching of evolution in US schools, says about human rationality?
I get that it can be especially hard to think rationally about politics. And I agree with what Eliezer has written about government policy being complex and almost always involving some trade-offs, so that we should be careful about thinking there's an obvious "rationalist view" on policy questions.
However, a ban on discussing issues that happen to be politicized is idiotic, because it puts us at the mercy of contingent facts about what forms of irrationality happen to be prevalent in political discussion at this time. Evolution is a prime example of this. Also, if the singularity became a political issue, would we ban discussion of that from LessWrong?
This post is mostly directed at newbies, which aren't supposed to be trained in trying to keep their brain from shutting down whenever the "politics" pattern matcher goes off.
In other words, it could cause some readers to stop reading before they get to the gist of the post. Even at Hacker News, I sometimes see "I stopped reading at this point" posts.
Also, I see zero benefit from mentioning global warming specifically in this post. Even a slight drawback outweigh zero benefit.
Oh dear... I admit I hadn't thought of the folks who will literally stop reading when they hit a political opinion they don't like. Yeah, I've encountered them. Though I think they have bigger problems than not knowing how to fix science, and don't think mentioning AGW did zero for this post.