Politics is the mind-killer', as most people use it, carries approximately the same content as 'boo politics'. If one of LW's top catchphrases is 'boo politics!', we're more likely to alienate people with the connections and expertise needed to handle politically charged blow-ups, group dynamics, etc. well.

I think this conflates "people who are good at group dynamics" and "people who argue a lot about abortion" into the category "politics people". I doubt there is much of a correlation between the two categories. If we really wanted people who were good at handling these sorts of things, I would look for business managers, sports team captains, and people with nonprofit experience before I started looking for people marked by an interest in politics.

From what I can tell, when organizations, communities, and movements avoid getting dragged through the mud due to misinformation being circulated online, it's frequently because they have friends who are skilled or connected e.g. at social media, diplomacy / PR.

Huh. That's neither of the two things I previously accused you of conflating. It's a third thing.

Having fully general counterarguments against your hated enemies, and lots of blog posts readying your troops for battle with those hated enemies, is not generally a winning way to avoid getting into lots of messy time-wasting fights. If one of LW's top catchphrases is 'boo politics!', we'll thereby by setting ourselves up as the Anti-Politics Tribe, a hated enemy of the Politics Tribes. The Politics Tribes are precisely the people we're trying to avoid picking fights with, especially not fights framed as tribalistic no-holds-barred absolutist sloganeering shouting matches.

Compare "We can't be against war in the Middle East, or else the Middle-Eastern-War-Fighting-Tribe will recognize us as their hated enemy and destroy us." This is not how it works. The Israelis dislike the Palestinians. The Palestinians dislike the Israelis. There is not a Middle-Eastern-War-Fighting-Tribe, composed of Israelis and Palestinians in equal parts, which values war in the Middle East as a terminal value and coordinates to defend it against its detractors.

There is no Politics Tribe who get offended by criticizing politics. There are various political groups who get offended if you allow politics and then some tiny subcomponent of you associates with the wrong side.

I've previously speculated that tribalism is so inescapable that the only way to have any hope of working towards correct beliefs rather than tribal signaling is founding a tribe around epistemic virtue. As such, I think you're right that we might sort of be starting an Anti-Politics Tribe, insofar as epistemic virtue and standard partisan politics don't mix. But I don't think anyone is going to start identifying as the Anti-Epistemic-Virtue Tribe to oppose us.

That's not my experience, but if that's true, then a lot of the people I'm interested in building ties to are in that high-value has-a-nuanced-position minority.

Is it fair for me to describe your goal as trying to shift our self-presentation to appeal to highly-political people?

I think we can both agree that we shouldn't exclude anyone a priori based on their meta-level beliefs about politics.

But I am also getting the impression that you think highly-political people are especially high value, whereas I think they are especially low value.

Consider the situation of a meetup group in a sketchy part of town. Occasionally there is gang violence nearby, but the meetup group is made up of nice people and has thus far mostly avoided it.

A member of the group has a bright idea. "Let's try especially hard to recruit hardened gangsters to our group. After all, they are extremely knowledgeable in gang violence and can protect us if any violence comes our way. At the very least, they can tell us from a position of experience what we should do to minimize our risk."

There is some truth to that argument.

But there's the counterargument that having lots of hardened gangsters in a group might make it a much more likely target for gang violence, and that inviting them in puts everyone at much greater risk.

More important, there's another counterargument that hardened gangsters are often violent people, and even if they don't provoke conflicts with gangsters outside the group, the next time the group has an argument about what kind of soda to bring to the meetup they might find that being full of hardened gangsters from opposing gangs makes it really hard to solve problems peacefully and cooperatively.

I think importing a lot of political people is likely to have the same dynamics - increased threat of violence from outside, increased threat of conflict from within. We already dodged a huge from-outside-bullet when most of the neoreactionaries moved over to More Right and Eliezer very publicly denied having any idea what they were talking about, thus denying Slate the "weird technolibertarian nerds probably in bed with crazy racists" article we both know they would have loved to write. And we already had to ban Eugene - a man interested in politics if ever there was one - for causing internal strife in a way that took years to detect and resolve and probably drove away a lot of good people. Do we really want to select our recruitment efforts for people with the same risk profile?