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kodos96 comments on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013 - Less Wrong
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Just curious... who is downvoting this post, and why? Politics is the mind killer, I know... but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?
What do you mean by that? Supposed on what grounds, accepted by whom and in what sense? (There's also a distinction between following a rule and agreeing with it, and there is no rule in this case.)
I was under the impression that this was an "official" thing, but it sounds like I was wrong.
People who don't want a regularly-occurring exception.
The entertaining thing from my perspective is that the discussions here have been polite, informative, and honest, and overall I'd consider them to have been productive thus far. It is of course possible that the tone or nature of these debates will change over time, but it seems on current evidence to be that a lot of people are mindkilled about whether or not politics is in fact a mindkiller. Granted, the voting system here generally encourages controversy - fifty votes yay and forty nine votes nay is better than an uninteresting post with one vote nay, after all.
Maybe the "mindkiller" business is largely a rationalization for the opposition to political discussion, and not the motivation for the opposition.
Some people like having their ideas questioned in a group, some don't. Mindkiller talk is a convenient rationalization for those who don't like it to pressure those who do like it to shut up.
Yes, I've noticed that too, which was part of why I was confused that people objected to it.
I upvoted Vladimir's post - but I don't think the lack of "accepted exception" means you should stop these discussion threads.
I'll continue them as long as they seem to remain productive and polite, and as long as they seem to be isolating politics rather than spreading political discussion around. A failure on either count would be a failure of the purpose of these threads.
There isn't an an official ban on politics either. The much cited "politics is the mind-killer" post, merely argued against using political examples in non-political contexts.
I downvoted this post because I don't want to see more attention to politics here. I don't see it as an "accepted exception" but as a recent push for more political discussions.
It can be interesting to talk about social issues, but doing this under the explicit heading "politics" header is likely to prime people into paying more attention to the political implications of the topic.
I take the debates that have occurred in these topics so far as evidence that LWers are capable of following the disclaimer. As such, unless it starts bleeding over into other topics, it seems okay. I prefer having a contained place with a disclaimer than to let arguments start getting political in other threads and either derail the thread or get cut off even though an interesting point was being made.
I disagree that one could talk about any kind of "social issues" whatsoever without it being 100% "political". Politics is what's going on in the polis.
The question isn't whether an issue is political or not (I'm not sure that's an interesting/meaningful question); the point is to avoid the problems of partisan thinking, and one way of doing that is to pay less attention to political alignment.
If you put a big banner over a discussion saying "HEY THIS IS A POLITICAL DISCUSSION", and you have people adding "AND THEREFORE, REPUBLICANS ARE RIGHT!" at the end of their posts, or reply with "OH, THAT'S A SOCIALIST ARGUMENT YOU'RE MAKING THERE", then everybody is necessarily going to pay more attention to partisan alignment. They may suspect others of trying to advance partisan points. They may be more selective in what arguments they accept. They may be less inclined points that go against their political inclination. It may degenerate into "Well you're just saying that because you're an anarcho-monarchist!".
I don't see any examples of people actually doing that, though.
Well, the first one is basically this thread, I don't think the second one happens without being downvoted to oblivion, and I think there have been a few cases where replies highlighted the political alignment of a post or comment that wasn't ostentatiously about color politics (probably in one episode of The Konkvistador And Multiheaded Show).
By "the first one" do you mean "AND THEREFORE, REPUBLICANS ARE RIGHT!"? If so, please cite examples.
I've been abstaining from LessWrong for awhile now, so I've missed a lot. Can you link me to some examples of what you mean by "The Konkvistador And Multiheaded Show"? It sounds highly entertaining.
I agree that talking about partisan labels is unlikely to lead to useful analysis (although the game-theoretic and principal-agent issues in the recent budget stand-off in the US are interesting).
But I think noting the contours of ideological movements (like socialism, feminism, or Moldbuggery) is valuable. The sentence:
Just as useful:
Some of our disagreement might be that in the US, socialist (or green or monarchist) is not a partisan label because there is no serious political party that asserts those views. Europe has more diverse active political movements.