It should be noted that the FAQ was largely written by a person (me) and should not necessarily be considered authoritative... if the LW community thinks something in the FAQ should change they should feel free to change it.
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 abou...
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.
"rationality" can be interpreted broadly enough that rational discussion of anything would count
"Rational discussion" is not rationality. You can very rationally discuss politics. You can very rationally discuss the life cycle of the cicada.
Truly "on topic" is content that helps the user to become more rational. Multiple definitions of rational apply: Being more practically effective counts. Being better able to sort through evidence counts. Meta-understanding on the meaning of rationality counts. Modelling what a rational...
Anything, as long as 1) it's chosen, written, and formulated in a way that shows alignment with the values of the community, taken in a broad way; 2) doesn't make LW look bad to outsiders. (There have been cases of mods stepping in, or the community shutting down certain insistent debaters, when it came to certain discussion topics, for reasons of it being very bad PR.)
The first condition in fact could be generalizable to pretty much any human group (deviations from this norm might be taken to be, basically, trolling), and is more restrictive than it may l...
"Here's an idea that can make you go crazy (and lose all your money) if you think about it too hard, let's write it up and give people nightmares for the next 4 years and counting".
I have this heuristic which states, if a bunch of smart people get excited about something, you should check it out. There's no obligation to also get excited about it (a lot of smart people get excited over classical literature, which does less than nothing for me, but I'm sure this is a product of my draw in the lottery of fascinations and not sloth.)
At this point, "anything that you find interesting and doesn't get downvoted into oblivion because nobody else finds it interesting" seems a reasonable criteria for "appropriate for LW". ...
Things I think should be treaded upon carefully if not avoided altogether:
At some point in a person's "training" as a rationalist, there comes a time when they are supposed to be ready to undertake controversial conversation topics without spontaneous combustion of their discussions. (Never mind that jokes and art are not exactly examples of controversial topics...) Rationality encompasses skills such as being able to accurately understand people's motives without caricaturing them, maintaining a good relationship with your conversation partners so that the channels for agreement and the channels for social relations don't get mixed (so that you can disagree sanely with someone), not straying the conversation away from collective truth-seeking and towards mini-wars etc. In fact I would say that a controversial topic such as politics is the best test of a person's actual wisdom and reasonableness.
I understand why some topics may not be appropriate for less-than-rational individuals. (But, again, these topics do not include humour and art and music! Otherwise you should pay a visit to the Wizard of Oz for him to give you a heart...) Anyone who has some legitimate claim towards better rationality skills, however, should at least try to test those better rationality skills on a higher difficulty setting. To forbid anything but sterile mathy discussions about game theory dilemmas involving alien intelligences does not improve the rationality level of people. (This honestly looks to me like cocooning; like fear of the outside world.) Nor does responsibly endeavouring to step into the arena of debates on topics relevant to humanity at large suddenly awaken your primal urges to kill, maim, and enslave your opponents. Ordinary people sometimes discuss this, in meatspace and on the internet. Ideas are expressed, values are clashed (instead of swords, mayhaps), insults are exchanged, people are warned or banned or not invited to the next dinner party. Egad, minds are sometimes even changed. With LessWrong, with all of our claims to an ardent dedication to rationality, I'm expecting to see less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff. Much more.
Politics is the Mindkiller is not a law of nature, but a word of caution.
At some point in a person's "training" as a rationalist, there comes a time when they are supposed to be ready to undertake controversial conversation topics without spontaneous combustion of their discussions.
I've found that people, in practice, tend to believe this point comes about five minutes after they've been introduced to the concept of rationality.
Empirically, I do think people who've put sufficient effort into debiasing are better at talking about value-loaded topics than those who haven't. But that doesn't do us much good as long ...
For example, what would be inappropriately off topic to post to LessWrong discussion about?
I couldn't find an answer in the FAQ. (Perhaps it'd be worth adding one.) The closest I could find was this:
However "rationality" can be interpreted broadly enough that rational discussion of anything would count, and my experience reading LW is compatible with this interpretation being applied by posters. Indeed my experience seems to suggest that practically everything is on topic; political discussion of certain sorts is frowned upon, but not due to being off topic. People often post about things far removed from the topics of interest. And some of these topics are very broad: it seems that a lot of material about self-improvement is acceptable, for instance.