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Kawoomba comments on In which I ask an inappropriate question... - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (29)
Yea these kinds of questions resonate badly with casual visitors, and a few affirmative answers can be easily misused to paint LW in a bad light. Maybe choose another, functionally equivalent but less controversial example?
That reminds me of a feature of 4chan, where there is no archive and every conversation is deleted after it becomes inactive. (This has been circumvented by other websites that archive 4chan threads, but not all of them get archived). I like being able to discuss ideas like this without ruining a website's reputation (though 4chan isn't a perfect analogy, because it discusses awful stuff so often that even if you can't find it on Google, it's reputation is terrible). Maybe LW should have something similar? Maybe you should be able create a thread that can only be viewed by people with >N karma? Or that, after so much time, will become viewable only by people with >N karma?
Interesting idea. It might give off phygish vibes, though (you must be Pure Thetan Level Six to learn about Xenu.)
I once got a friend to read HP:MoR after a year of mentioning it. After the first few pages, he googled Eliezer Yudkowsky and within a few minutes was on the Less Wrong discussion section, where he immediately found "Nazis vs Jews" (posing the question "what if Jew-killing is a terminal value for Nazis, and what if there are orders of magnitude more Nazis than Jews, what do you do, from a utilitarian perspective?"), as well as "how to stop people from being creepy at your Less Wrong meetup."
Also, not one, but two My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Rationalist Fanfics.
That was pretty much the end of that.
Not all fanfics are created equally, eh?
Also, the question would be less visible if asked in an Open Thread. Writing it as an article makes it seem more... official? ...than writing it as a comment. At least, if I would read a different website, I would take articles as stronger evidence about the community than isolated comments. The articles are supposed to reflect the ideas of website owners; the comments could be from anyone, and often they are contrary to the ideas of the website.
On the other hand, if we can't ask questions like CronoDAS' on LessWrong, where the hell can we?
In all controversial questions I can think of (offhand), that problem can be sidestepped by phrasing it in less loaded terms, e.g. "group A", "group B", you get the picture.
Also has the benefit of avoiding political/mindkilling contexts when they are not inextricably linked with the question, making rational discourse easier (though a controversial framing does offer the benefit of often making the question more poignant).