So, officially there is a battle between X and Y, and secretly there is a battle between X1 and X2 (and Y1 and Y2 on the other side). And people from X1 and X2 keep rationalizing about why their approach is the best strategy for the true victory of X against Y (and vice versa on the other side).
This part doesn't make clear enough the observation that X2 and Y2 are cooperating, across enemy lines, to weaken X1 and Y1. 2 being politeness and community, and 1 being psychopathy and violence.
Disclaimer: I mentioned psychopaths and violent people, but that's in a context of an actual war and actual killing. If we only speak about "fighting" metaphorically, we need to appropriately redefine what it means to be "violent". In context of verbal internet wars, the analogy of psychopaths would be trolls, and the analogy of people who enjoy violence would be people who enjoy winning debates.
For the internet version of Genghis Khan, the greatest joy is to defeat his enemies in a public discourse, make them unpopular, destroy their w...
Scott, known on LessWrong as Yvain, recently wrote a post complaining about an inaccurate rape statistic.
Arthur Chu, who is notable for winning money on Jeopardy recently, argued against Scott's stance that we should be honest in arguments in a comment thread on Jeff Kaufman's Facebook profile, which can be read here.
Scott just responded here, with a number of points relevant to the topic of rationalist communities.
I am interested in what LW thinks of this.
Obviously, at some point being polite in our arguments is silly. I'd be interested in people's opinions of how dire the real world consequences have to be before it's worthwhile debating dishonestly.