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Lexico comments on Politics is hard mode - Less Wrong
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This might be the crux of our disagreement.
I don't have statistics for Less Wrong, but here are some for SSC. The topic is "median number of page views for different types of post throughout 2014".
As you can see, interest in charity and statistics is the lowest, followed by interest in transhumanism and rationality. Politics is the highest of the group that clusters around the 3000s. Then comes "race and gender" at 8000, and "things i will regret writing" (my tag for very controversial political rants that will make a lot of people very angry) at 16000, ie about five times the level for rationality or transhumanism.
This seems to correspond to how things work on Less Wrong, where for example a basic introduction of misogyny and mansplaining got almost twice as many comments as Anna's massive and brilliant post resolving a bunch of philosophy of mind issues and more than three times as many as Luke's heavily researched primer on fighting procrastination.
Not to mention that disaster with Eugene was politically based. I'm pretty sure nobody mass-downvotes because someone else disagrees with them about GiveWell.
Less Wrong is massively at risk of falling in love with politics. Politics is much more interesting and attention-sucking than working on important foundational questions, and as soon as we relax the taboo on it we are doomed. On the other hand, most of the people who say we're "arrogant" will find a reason to think so no matter how we phrase things. I mean, what happens when they're okay with our pithy slogan on politics, look at the site, and figure out what we actually believe?
That having been said, if you've been doing a lot of public relations work and empirically find a lot of people are turned off by the way "politics is the mind-killer" is used in practice, I can't tell you you're wrong. I just hope that however you choose to push the same idea doesn't result in a sudden influx of people who think politics is great and are anxious to prove they're capable of "hard mode".
I wonder if the number of comments might be a better heuristic for measuring the variance in people's perspective on the article. If you look at those 3 examples, the first had the most comments, but the least upvotes and lowest percentage positive.
If someone feels that they are in agreement and their viewpoint is already present in the discussion they might have a lower likelihood of adding another comment, but if there is a larger variance in the viewpoints on an issue than people would be more likely to have what they feel is unique information to add to the discussion.
As a continuation of that idea though. One of the prerequisites of factionalization / triblization is the existence in enough variance in viewpoints to create distinct independent clusters. Others in the same cluster become the in group, and those outside of the cluster become the out group.
However, while variance is required for clustering, clustering isn't always present with high variance. You can still have more uniform distributions with large spreads.
Being aware that clustering effects are more likely in areas of high variance seems to me to a a good heuristic to internalize.