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shminux comments on Politics Filtering and Higher Standard Discussions - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm wondering why you would want to. Any contentious political issue can usually be disassembled into non-political ones, usually some combination of economics, history, physics, logic and cognitive science. Start with something like "Is Obama a Muslim?", "Is smaller government better?", "Is global warming real?", "Is assisted suicide murder?" and break it down into non-political or less obviously political components, like the measurable effects of faith on job performance, a comparative discussion of the role of various levels of governments, from family council to condo owners association and up, in various countries and cultures, and so on. There is no point in explicitly discussing an issue which triggers affiliation- and identity-based biases.
I largely agree. But I strongly suspect that it's possible for some groups of people to have meaningful, productive discussions of political issues, even if they don't all agree. The difficulty is that this scenario is unstable: once any member of the discussion takes offense, uses their arguments as soldiers, or otherwise misuses words, it becomes next to impossible to back out and return to the previous level of discourse.
There are probably ways of making such discussions more stable, if not perfectly so. I for one would be curious to know what these are.
Even extremely reasonable people tend to use arguments as soldiers. Here a disability rights advocate Harriet McBryde Johnson recounts her discussions with the philosopher Peter Singer (I stumbled across it on Eliezer's facebook page). Both very intelligent and reasonable people, they were unable to come to any common ground to speak of, due to what seems like their inability to look for simple common issues they can agree on without triggering identity-based emotions and then build on them. I found it a really sad story.
That's unlikely to be very helpful. What I am looking at is in the middle of a huge ugh field and people have gotten very good at putting together the pieces. I can take break the core into subcritical pieces, but I can't deal with the decay radiation.