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Eugine_Nier comments on Changing Systems is Different than Running Controlled Experiments - Don’t Choose How to Run Your Country That Way! - Less Wrong
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Comments (260)
It violates the politics is the mind-killer rule, i.e., don't use examples from contemporary politics for an apolitical point.
I wonder if that's why there's so much downvoting in the comments here?
I would be surprised if that were the case. Non-passionate annoyance about people discussing politics doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would inspire around 30 down votes of the post and multiple people going and down voting 10-20 of my comments at a time.
Rape is a topic that people care a lot about for a number of different reasons, with very different desired outcomes regarding wanting discussion and lack thereof.
The comments up until recent have actually been surprisingly chill and non-flaming.
When I try to talk to people about hot topics like rape or child abuse in person, the most common response I get is people really not wanting to talk about it. "Sorry, I can't handle that right now" type responses. My experience is that most people really don't want to think about it and feel somewhat violated even at bringing the topic up. My guess is that most of those people glossed over the post, and neither up nor down voted, although they may have down voted.
People who have experience with rape and other forms of being violated often really want to have discussion about it, especially sane and level discussion when in the context of Less Wrong, which I think is why the up voting. I have many potential theories about why the down voting. There are probably several different sets who are doing it.
One obvious candidate would be anyone who has caused someone to have sex with them that was non-consensual. If we assume that Less Wrong even roughly reflects the general population, and that the article I cited above even roughly reflects the general population, and note that there are thousands of readers, it is safe to assume that some of those people are readers, and they probably have very strong opinions on this topic.
Another category of down voters could be people who didn't like my formatting initially, I was amused by what a strong objection there was to that.
My guess would be that the "I don't want to talk about this" reaction accounts for most of the downvotes.
I'm not sure LW is using a consistent definition of 'political', but possibly I'm misremembering what I've seen.
My impression was that the sense in which "political" was previously used here had more to do with rival identity groups whose claims on power were disputed — "Blues and Greens"; Republicans and Democrats; socialists and libertarians; and so on.
More recently, however, it seems to be used to excuse bad epistemic behavior — responding to straw men or stereotypes; mere contradiction; attacking noncentral points; etc. — on any topic pertaining to contemporary human society or social organization.
feminists vs. PUA/MRA
Avoiding the tribalism doesn't mean avoiding all the object-level bits of reality the tribes are interested in.
It seems...broken if I can get together a group of people and say "we have strong opinions about X and we call ourselves Xians" and then LessWrong doesn't discuss X anymore.
I never said we couldn't have political discussions about X. What I said was don't use X as an example when making a non-political point.