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:
It appears that you think autistic people are less rational than the average person. Why do you think that?
If we just pretend the context of FrameBenignly and Dahlen didn't exist (I don't agree with everything either of them said) and take this statement in isolation, ignoring the whole "is this intended to be offensive or not" aspect...
Isn't it a given that anyone with a mental impairment of any kind is less instrumentally rational than a similar person without impairment? We don't usually give diagnosis to people who tend to win at stuff.
not being good at some kinds of intuitive understanding of other people" is not at all the same thing as "being less rational than average".
But it is. Assuming we're modelling the entire brain as part of the agent, if you take two individuals, give them the same info, and one of them is able to correctly act on that information and win while and the other is not able, then all else being equal the one who won is the more rational of the two. (We're modelling the entire brain as agent here, so this would even be true for things like epilepsy. There are other ways to model this, such that the autistic person is just as rational but acting on less information, but that's a bit convoluted because we'd have to consider some parts of the brain as "agent" and others as just complex sensimotor bodily organs)
I'm not trying to diss autistic people here, just reiterating: Rationality is not intelligence, rationality is not goodness, rationality is simply acting in ways conducive to winning. I have ADHD myself, and yes, that trait makes me less instrumentally rational - and I think the same goes for autism and others.
(After writing I considered deleting this because it would be easy for an angry person to miss the point and take it as justification for what Dahlen wrote. I dislike his conflation of "autists" with "people who don't look at art or whatever" as much as everyone else because it's simply not true and perpetuates misconceptions of autistic people. But Lesswrong doesn't let you gracefully delete things, and if one can't play devil's advocate here then where else? So I'll leave it up.)
Isn't it a given that anyone with a mental impairment of any kind is less instrumentally rational [...] We don't usually give diagnosis to people who tend to win at stuff.
I am unconvinced by the broadest versions of the "rationality = winning" thesis, for reasons I've mentioned to alienist elsewhere in this thread. The very broadest version ("rationality = anything conducive to winning") would make, e.g., shortness or heart disease kinds of irrationality. A more reasonable intermediate version ("rationality = any features of one...
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.