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roystgnr comments on What topics are appropriate for LessWrong? - Less Wrong
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There was just an astonishingly civil examination of the most mindkilling topic I could think of in Discussion. I've criticized people for violating the LessWrong politics taboo in the past, but I'd be happy to chat about anything from particular elections to the merits of Marxism if it was always done so painstakingly in the articles and so thoughtfully in the rebuttals.
I'm not sure how to achieve that, though. "Everybody can talk about politics carelessly" isn't any better an idea than it was before, and trying to enforce "only talk about politics carefully" might just add tone arguments without actually improving the tone.
Abortion is a strongly mindkilling topic for society in general, but it is not one for Less Wrong. According to Yvain's survey data on a 5-point scale the responses on abortion average 4.38 + 1.032, which indicates a rather strong consensus accepting it. As a contrast, the results for Social Justice are 3.15 + 1.385. This matches my intuitive sense that discussions of social justice on LW are much more mindkilling than discussions of abortion.
If a "pro-choice" essay had been under discussion, then "LessWrong is already pro-choice, of course it's not going to be a mindkilling discussion" would have been my conclusion as well. But the thesis of the essay was strongly "pro-life", and it still got a good reception, with rebuttals mostly of the form "here's what's wrong with your assumptions and numbers" rather than "go away you woman-enslaving theocrat".
It could just be that the survey questions don't distinguish between different reasons for various stances? There may be a big practical difference between "I'm strongly pro-choice because analysis of this complicated moral question heavily tips that way, so I'm open to reconsidering if my reasoning is weaker than I thought" and "I'm strongly pro-choice because there's no good more-moderate Schelling point, so any attempt to undermine my position must be fought like a camel's nose in the tent."
From eyeballing the survey results, we might expect the worst ideological conflicts on LW to be those current among libertarians, liberals, and moderate-to-mainline socialists, and especially those that're interesting to nerds with those affiliations: not, for example, abortion or immigration, where one camp's almost exclusively conservative. And indeed, the most heated political arguments on LW that I remember have dealt with radical feminism, fat acceptance, the treatment of women in nerd culture, and anything vaguely associated with pick-up artistry. Nothing economic, which is a bit of a surprise, but maybe it's easier to cast those issues in consequential terms -- or maybe taxes just aren't sexy.
The ethno-nationalist wing of neoreaction has also caused problems, but I think that had less to do with the subject matter and more to do with the poster: long-time SSC readers may remember him as Jim.
This could either show that the topic isn't mindkilling, or that it is very mindkilling, if the Less Wrong consensus happens to be simply mistaken.
My understanding of the use of "mindkilled" is that people who can be so described are incapable of discussing the relevant issue dispassionately, acquiring an us-vs-them tribal mentality and seeing arguments just as soldiers for their side. I really don't think that this applies to the topic of abortion on LW, which can be discussed dispassionately (much more so than in other places, at least). This is quite compatible with the possibility that the LW consensus is biased and wrong, which is what you are suggesting.