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

10 [deleted] 21 January 2011 11:07AM

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Comment author: lukeprog 22 January 2011 02:52:46PM 7 points [-]

I vote for keeping politics out of things. I do not trust LWers to discuss politics rationally most of the time. Nor do I trust myself to discuss politics rationally most of the time. The articles and discussion on Less Wrong have been fantastic without politics.

Comment author: Ultima 23 January 2011 06:01:56PM *  -2 points [-]

How could the LWers learn to discuss it rationally if you keep it out right from the outset? Isn't talking about something rationally a skill that you acquire? Sure, most people have no idea how to discuss politics rationally (and furthermore have no idea that they have no idea how to talk about it in a rational way), but that doesn't mean that they can't learn. If you keep your kid on a leash all day because you don't trust him to make the right decisions, what exactly would be bound to happen once you get distracted and drop the leash for a few minutes?

Comment author: Nornagest 26 January 2011 08:24:22PM *  1 point [-]

It's inappropriate to treat politics as a separate magisterium. There's nothing exceptional about the tools we apply to the topic: we've discussed collective action problems, social signaling, and defense against rhetoric and marketing at length here, all mostly without making recourse to their political applications.

LWers can learn to discuss politics rationally by building skill in the techniques appropriate to political discussion. Using political examples directly could be expected to do this efficiently iff we successfully manage to keep the discussion on the techniques themselves, but politics is loaded with so much bias that that's an exceptionally difficult task; if we can't hack it, the better option overall is to train on less efficient but less distracting examples.