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cousin_it comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion
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We have tried to discuss topics like race and gender many times, and always failed. At some point I had this idea that maybe we could get better results if we sometimes enforced political conformity within comment threads :-) For example, if we had a thread of like-minded people discussing "how to make our country more vibrant and diverse" and a separate thread about "how to stop the corrupting influence of Negroes on the youth", I suspect that both threads would have a better signal-to-noise ratio and contain more interesting insights than a unified "let's all argue about racism" thread.
Of course this requires that people from thread A resist the temptation to drop in on thread B for target practice and vice versa. Some especially fervent people may feel threatened by the mere existence of thread A or thread B. (I have actually heard from some LWers that they'd consider it immoral to create such threads.)
The overall level of rationality of a community should be measured by their ability to have a sane and productive debate on those topics, and on politics in general.
Sure, agreed. But it doesn't follow that a community that desires to be rational should therefore engage in debates on those topics (and on politics in general) when it has low confidence that it can do so in a sane and productive way.
An interesting thought, but as a practical idea it's a bad idea.
A lot of the problems with how people debate is that the underlying assumptions are different, but this goes unnoticed. So two people can argue on whether it's right or wrong to fight in Iraq when their actual disagreement is on whether Arabs count as people, and could actually argue for hours before realizing this disagreement exists (Note: This is not a hypothetical example). Failing to target the fundamental assumption differences leads to much of the miscommunication we so often see.
By having two (or more) debates branch off of different and incompatible assumptions, we're risking people solidifying in holding the wrong assumption, or even forgetting they're making it. The human mind is such that it seeks to integrate beliefs into a (more or less) coherent network without glaring contradictions, and by making people think long and hard off of a false assumption, we're poisoning their thinking process rather than enriching it. Even if, as you say, the signal-to-noise ratio is supposedly higher.
I would advise targeting the underlying disagreements first, proceeding only once those are dismantled.
Hmm. It seems to me that the people who would discuss a topic like "how to make our country more vibrant and diverse" are likely already convinced about some basic assumptions. If they don't get to have the discussion, they will stay just as convinced, but less informed.
Can we please try this? I think it's a really good idea.
Can you contact Konkvistador? I remember he had a detailed plan for this idea.