You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

TheOtherDave comments on Politics is a fact of life - Less Wrong Discussion

10 [deleted] 21 January 2011 11:07AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (51)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 21 January 2011 07:00:56PM 3 points [-]

Sure, valueless political discussions are valueless, and valuable ones aren't. Of course.

The question is whether we {do, should, can} condition our rejection of a discussion on its valuelessness rather than its political character. The implicit suggestion is that rather than treating political discussions as something special, we ought to enforce the general rule of rejecting valueless discussion.

The main difficulty I see is that we don't actually seem to enforce such a general rule.

Comment author: Costanza 21 January 2011 07:23:02PM 3 points [-]

I'd rather say that the "political character" of a discussion on an open internet forum like this -- one not devoted to politics -- tends to be a very good predictor that the discussion will be valueless, or worse. I'm sure there would be exceptions, but I don't know that this is shows much of an error in the existing karma system.