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Dr_Manhattan comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's posts like this that make me wish for a limited-access forum for discussing these issues, something along the lines of an Iconoclastic Conspiracy.
The set of topics too inflammatory for LW to talk about sanely seems pretty small (though not empty), but there's a considerably larger set of topics too politically sensitive for us to safely discuss without the site taking a serious status hit. This basically has nothing to do with our intra-group rationality: no matter how careful we are in our approach, taking (say) anarcho-primitivism seriously is going to alienate some potential audiences, and the more taboo subjects we broach the more alienation we'll get. This is true even if the presentation is entirely apolitical: I've talked to people who were so squicked by Torture vs. Dust Specks as to be permanently turned off the site. On the other hand (and perhaps more relevantly to the OP), as best I can tell there's nothing uniquely horrible about any particular taboo subject, and most that I can think of aren't terribly dangerous in isolation: it's volume that causes problems.
Now, it's tempting to say "fuck 'em if they can't take it", but this really is a bad thing from the waterline perspective: the more cavalier we get about sensitive or squicky examples, the higher we're setting the sanity bar for membership in our community. Set it high enough and we effectively turn ourselves into something analogous to a high-IQ society, with all the signaling and executive problems that that implies.
We'll never look completely benign to the public: it's hard to imagine decoupling weak transhumanism from our methodology, for example. But minimizing the public-facing exposure of the more inflammatory concepts we deal in does seem like a good idea if we're really interested in outreach.
Specifically, I think this line has already been crossed with multiple polyamory discussions. When I started reading this site (while still being a religiously observant Jew) this is the sort of thing that might have quickly classified LW as a 'bunch of hippies who look for "rational" reasons to operate outside of social norms'.
I think there are good reasons to discuss this specific topic as a test case for rationality, but people need to be acutely aware of the tradeoffs.
More specifically if SI gains enough prominence to be noticed by news outlets I'd prefer more of this image
and less of this
On the other side of things, coming in as a poly person from the midwest, the openness on the topic is one of the things that really drew me. Around here (Ohio), one NEVER talks about such things, unless you happen to be in a poly-specific forum, or with your poly friends.
It seems like the rationalist/skeptic community is the one exception to this, and I find it a breath of fresh air: A community that isn't there specifically as a poly group, but where it's not a completely taboo subject either.
Even before I personally ever identified as poly, I don't think it would have bothered me to see it mentioned here. But I can see how more socially conservative folk would be put off by it. I don't know if that's our target audience, though.
You just had to bring up the one controversial issue popular on LW that I actually have an identity stake in, didn't you?
You might be right, though. Poly doesn't set off my "dangerously controversial" flags, but that's probably selection bias talking; I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and run in fairly countercultural circles. Now that I'm actually thinking about it I can definitely see how it'd bring up strong negative associations in a lot of cultures. On the other hand, I don't think the LW consensus holds it up as a universally preferable relationship model, either -- but if it's a taboo rather than a merely controversial position, that doesn't actually matter. And I'd hardly call it essential to instrumental rationality.
Which leaves the question of where the line should be drawn. I'd say Alicorn's "Polyhacking" is one of the best posts here on the instrumental side of the instrumental/epistemic divide, and I'd hate to see similar content relegated to conspiratorial mailing lists -- but it's hard to imagine a post more perfectly calibrated to trigger avoidance instincts in someone with a polyamory taboo. Adding more context or disclaimers would probably not be effective. The implicit policy so far seems to have been to ignore traditionalist taboos, presumably on the assumption that anyone with deeply rooted traditionalist instincts is unteachable, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
Nah.