As I've said elsewhere, it's worth taking the second-order effects into account.
That is, suppose I accept for the sake of comity that LW's exceptional discussion-having abilities would be well-used discussing partisan national politics. (In actual fact I'm unconvinced of this, given what I've seen of it.)
I should still ask myself what kinds of people will join LW if we start regularly discussing such issues who would not otherwise join, and what effect they will have on our exceptional discussion-having abilities.
My prediction, given that we're an open-registration forum on the Internet, is that it will net degrade those abilities.
I realise more and more that I did not phrase my question/query very well. What I meant with a political discussion was that you have a general issue and you try to find either the truth or a consens if possible. So I don't want to discuss Democrats vs Republicans (I am German anyway) but talk about certain issues that you would not want to discuss, because they are "political". (e.g. same sex marriage, how to minimise poverty etc.)
Hello fellow LWs,
As I have read repeatedly on LW (http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/) you don't like discussing politics because it produces biased thinking/arguing which I agree is true for the general populace. What I find curious is that you don't seem to even try it here where people would be very likely to keep their identities small (www.paulgraham.com/identity.html). It should be the perfect (or close enough) environment to talk politics because you can have reasonable discussions here.
I do understand that you don't like to bring politics into discussions about rationality, but I don't understand why there shouldn't be dedicated political threads here. (Maybe you could flag them?)
all the best
Viper