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
It's usually very hard to recognize when one get's mindkilled.
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.
Empirical evidence from studies suggests that it needs very little to get people who can use Bayes rules for abstract textbook problems to avoid using it when faced with a political subject where they care about one side winning. That's what "mind-killing" is about. People on LW aren't immune on that regard. I have plenty of times seen that someone on LW makes an argument on the subject of politics that he surely wouldn't make on a less charged subject because they argument structure doesn't work.
Yes, but Bayesian rules are about predictions e.g. would a policy what it is expected to do e.g. does raising the min wage lead to unemployment or not, and political philosophy is one meta-level higher than that e.g. is unemployment bad or not, or is it unjust or not. While it is perhaps possible and perhaps preferable to turn all questions of political philosophy into predictive models, changing some of them and some other questions simply dissolved (i.e. is X fair?) if they cannot be, that is not done yet, and that is precisely what could be done here. Because where else?
(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.