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Konkvistador comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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I have the impression that (1) when people post things in LW that are politically leftish, it's quite common for them to get a response along these lines -- complaining about leftward bias and suggesting that it should be addressed by a deliberate injection of rightward bias to compensate -- whereas (2) when people post things in LW that are politically rightish, they basically never receive such responses.
I have no statistics or anything to back this up, and it's not clear that there's any feasible way to get (or informatively fail to get) them, so I'd be interested in other opinions about whether this asymmetry is real.
If it is real, it seems to me quite interesting.
(One possible explanation, if it's real, would be that leftish views are much more common here than rightish ones, so that people with rightish views feel ill-treated and want the balance redressed. Except that I think I see distinctly more rightish than leftish political commentary here, and the rightish stuff more often gets large numbers of upvotes. I suppose it's possible that what we have here is a lot of slightly leftish people and a smaller number of rightish ones who feel more strongly. Again, this is probably hard to get a good handle on and I'd be interested in others' impressions.)
Well right wing people are almost certainly a minority here, but don't forget that makes such positions convenient for hipster fun. Some LWers who argue for right wing positions have stated that they feel more and more unwelcome in the past few months. Not only that I think they make a good case for pro left bias being very prevasive on LessWrong. I think what you are seeing is some users trying to correct for it.
I find the fact that both people who see themselves as left leaning and those who see themselves as right leaning suddenly feel there is favouritism for those who disagree with them is a much more worrying sign. I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside.
I dislike the fact that we're talking about the bias rather than the arguments. Here, more so than any other place I know of, we should be dissecting arguments and talking about the truths of the issues, rather than saying that a statement is incorrect because of its side on the political spectrum.
I can't be the only person thinking this, right?
This site is about refining the art of human rationality, while we certainly do try to get a good map of the world we spend most of our time thinking about thinking. The fundamental realization at the heart of our community, that to a certain extent distinguishes it from traditional rationality, is that humans are biased and broken thinkers who can't rely on their naive reasoning too much. You can think as long and as calmly as you like but if you base your thinking on broken axioms or bad epistemology you won't get much closer to truth.
I did not say or even wish to imply a set of arguments was wrong because of political affiliation, neither where the users I linked to. What I was implying quite strongly is that we are unlikely to hear the best arguments or to update appropriately to those that are politically inconvenient. Not even because of a desire to engage in propaganda for ones cause, but because the world simply looks a certain way to them! There are many correct arguments one can make for incorrect positions, by selectively only hearing correct arguments one does not by default hear the counter-arguments or correct arguments for other positions and perhaps doesn't' even realize they may exist. These are not a controversial observations at all.
Following this reasoning and promoted by complaints and observations observations of my own I stated my argument by pointing out the dominant political affiliation and ideological assumptions on the site and how this harms the rationality of the community on certain subjects.
This rationality quote by Jonathan Haidt may explain this better than I have. Also here is me making an argument explicitly along those lines.