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:
The article I cited reported that breast fed infants wind up getting up to 1000 times as much aluminum from vaccines as from diet. That is the empirical result that paper was reporting. The rest is window dressing which would be at best the authors opinion. The question of whether getting that amount of aluminum is toxic is more complicated. The natural experiment is to scale it for weight and inject it into post natal mice. That experiment has been done and reports they suffer great developmental damage. There's also a fair amount of epidemiology that bears on the subject, which also suggests the aluminum is causing damage. Its highly correlated with autism, for example. I reviewed the literature all with links to about 3 dozen citations at http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/08/example-1-pediatrician-belief-is-opposite-the-published-scientific-evidence-on-early-vaccine-safety/
Also, I suggest to you that there is demonstrably very strong crowd think effects on the subject of vaccines. A phenomenon of crowd think is persecution of heretics. In such a climate, scientists publishing results that challenge the orthodoxy have to tread very sensitively indeed if they wish to avoid the inquisition. And they often respond to this by adding various flowery prose to their publications such as that which you mention, mitigating the distaste of having to report such contrary results. If you wish to understand crowd think better, I recommend: http://whyarethingsthisway.com/2014/03/22/why-are-the-pediatricians-so-confused-about-the-actual-state-of-the-scientific-literature/
There's no "inquisition" in medicine. There's peer review to ensure you did your homework, and government agencies to ensure you don't hurt (too many) people.
window dressing which would be at best the authors opinion [...] various flowery prose [...] mitigating the distaste
What criterion are you using to select what counts as fact and what is immaterial? How would you identify an author who is being reasonably cautious not to make any unjustified statements?
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.