Political topics elicit lower quality participation, holding the set of participants fixed. This is the thesis of "politics is the mind-killer".
I don't think that's a good description. The article argues that using political example when you can make the same point with a nonpolitical example is bad because the political aspect prevents people from using their usual reasoning abilities.
This is a plausible, and worrying point. Is there some evidence for the basic thesis beyond simple intuitiveness?
So, has there been an influx of new participants into LW who only want to argue politics? I haven't noticed any.
It's also worth pointing out that we mostly debate political philosophy and not politics. Politics debates look like "Should Obama just ignore Congress and ram through whatever regulations he can?" or "Is Ted Cruz the greatest guy ever?" or "Shall we just tell the Greeks to go jump into the Aegean sea?" and we do NOT have them.
I'm not sure if it says more about me or the context I'm used to seeing here at Less Wrong, but when I read, "Shall we just tell the Greeks to go jump into the Aegean sea?" I thought "Iliad" before "ongoing economic crisis." If that order ever flips, we may have gotten too much into current events and lost our endearing weirdness and classicism.
As I've mentioned in the other recent political thread, it's not just that political topics elicit lower quality participation. Even if you have the best of intentions and can keep your mind-killing mechanisms in check, it's extremely hard to have a rational debate about politics.
Political participants do not just have different norms of community participation: by definition, they have very different motivations as well. This is the real take-away of Politics is the mind-killer. Keep in mind that politics is a kind of conflict: it's about things that people actually fight over, in the real world. So the difference in norms may well be a consequence of these motivations: as the potential for real strife increases sharply, good deliberation becomes less relevant and "fairness" concerns are far more important:
This is why ...
We need to be able to sort which participants perceive parts of Haidt's moral taste spectrum before we have any discussion on anything.
I'm a bit curious what prompted you to post this?
What I've been noticing is that right now, Slatestarcodex is sort of the place people go to talk about politics in a rationality-infused setting, and the comments there have been trending in the direction you'd caution about. (I'm not sure whether to be sad about that or glad that there's a designated place for political fighting)
I think that there needs to be somewhere to discuss politics related to Less Wrong, but somewhere away from the main site. Ideally somewhere hard to find so as to keep the quality high.
There are certain questions that have several possible answers, where people decide that a certain answer is obviously true and have trouble seeing the appeal of the other answers. If everyone settles on the same answer, all is well. If different people arrive at different answers and each believes that his answer is the obvious one, then the stage is set for a flame war. When you think the other guy's position is obviously false, it's that much harder to take him seriously.
This is why I write about political philosophy, not politics. E.g. I disagree with John Rawl's veil-of-ignorance theory and even find it borderline disgusting (he is just assuming everybody is a risk-averse coward), but I don't see either myself or anyone else getting mind-killingly tribal over it. After all it is not about a party. It is not about an election program. It is not about power. It is about ideas.
I see the opposite norm what you mention: I think when I write about political philosophy on LW it gets a negative reaction because it is too politic...
After you get a taste of LW, every other internet forum feels stupid
And why do you think this is so? Are all participants on this forum genetically superior, and they have to prove it by giving a DNA sample before registering the user account? Or could it be because some topics and some norms of the debate attract some kind of people (and the few exceptions are then removed by downvoting)? Any other hypothesis?
If you propose another hypothesis, please don't just say "well, it is because you are (for example) more intelligent or more reasonable" without adding an explanation about how specifically this website succeeds in attracting the intelligent and/or reasonable people, without attracting the other kinds of people, so the newcomers who don't fit the norm are not able to simply outvote the old members and change the nature of the website dramatically. (Especially considering that this is a community blog, not one person's personal blog such as Slate Star Codex.)
I upvoted for this:
However, there were already such threads in the past. Maybe you should google them, look at the debate and see what happened back then -- because it is likely to happen again.
And, to further drive home the point, I'll link to the ones I could easily find: Jan 2012, Aug 2012, Dec 2012, Jan 2013, Feb 2013, more Feb 2013, Oct 2013, Jun 2014, Nov 2014.
Viliam_Bur is the person who gets messages asking him to deal with mass downvotes, so I am sympathetic to him not wanting us to attract more mass downvoters.
(I hope that is the least click-baity title ever.)
Political topics elicit lower quality participation, holding the set of participants fixed. This is the thesis of "politics is the mind-killer".
Here's a separate effect: Political topics attract mind-killed participants. This can happen even when the initial participants are not mind-killed by the topic.
Since outreach is important, this could be a good thing. Raise the sanity water line! But the sea of people eager to enter political discussions is vast, and the epistemic problems can run deep. Of course not everyone needs to come perfectly prealigned with community norms, but any community will be limited in how robustly it can handle an influx of participants expecting a different set of norms. If you look at other forums, it seems to take very little overt contemporary political discussion before the whole place is swamped, and politics becomes endemic. As appealing as "LW, but with slightly more contemporary politics" sounds, it's probably not even an option. You have "LW, with politics in every thread", and "LW, with as little politics as we can manage".
That said, most of the problems are avoided by just not saying anything that patterns matches too easily to current political issues. From what I can tell, LW has always had tons of meta-political content, which doesn't seem to cause problems, as well as standard political points presented in unusual ways, and contrarian political opinions that are too marginal to raise concern. Frankly, if you have a "no politics" norm, people will still talk about politics, but to a limited degree. But if you don't even half-heartedly (or even hypocritically) discourage politics, then a open-entry site that accepts general topics will risk spiraling too far in a political direction.
As an aside, I'm not apolitical. Although some people advance a more sweeping dismissal of the importance or utility of political debate, this isn't required to justify restricting politics in certain contexts. The sort of the argument I've sketched (I don't want LW to be swamped by the worse sorts of people who can be attracted to political debate) is enough. There's no hypocrisy in not wanting politics on LW, but accepting political talk (and the warts it entails) elsewhere. Of the top of my head, Yvain is one LW affiliate who now largely writes about more politically charged topics on their own blog (SlateStarCodex), and there are some other progressive blogs in that direction. There are libertarians and right-leaning (reactionary? NRx-lbgt?) connections. I would love a grand unification as much as anyone, (of course, provided we all realize that I've been right all along), but please let's not tell the generals to bring their armies here for the negotiations.