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ChristianKl comments on Political topics attract participants inclined to use the norms of mainstream political debate, risking a tipping point to lower quality discussion - Less Wrong
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Comments (71)
It's usually very hard to recognize when one get's mindkilled.
Empirical evidence from studies suggests that it needs very little to get people who can use Bayes rules for abstract textbook problems to avoid using it when faced with a political subject where they care about one side winning. That's what "mind-killing" is about. People on LW aren't immune on that regard. I have plenty of times seen that someone on LW makes an argument on the subject of politics that he surely wouldn't make on a less charged subject because they argument structure doesn't work.
Yes, but Bayesian rules are about predictions e.g. would a policy what it is expected to do e.g. does raising the min wage lead to unemployment or not, and political philosophy is one meta-level higher than that e.g. is unemployment bad or not, or is it unjust or not. While it is perhaps possible and perhaps preferable to turn all questions of political philosophy into predictive models, changing some of them and some other questions simply dissolved (i.e. is X fair?) if they cannot be, that is not done yet, and that is precisely what could be done here. Because where else?
When talking about issues of political philosophy you often tend to talk quite vaguely and are to vague to be wrong. That's not being mind-killed but it's also not productive.
If you want to decide whether unemployment is bad or not than factual questions about unemployment matter a great deal. How does unemployment affect the happiness of the unemployed? To what extend do the unemployed use their time to do something useful for society like volunteering?