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OrphanWilde comments on Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's about the defaults. The problem with political debates is that it is difficult to contain them -- they are likely to grow (because for almost any topic you can find a political point of view), and they attract new people who are interested more in promoting a political idea than about improving their own rationality.
So we can either explicitly support the norm "we don't debate politics (unless there is an exception)", or we can either explicitly or implicitly have the norm "political debates are okay". We have the former.
Maybe there are other possible solutions, such as trying to contain politics in specific threads, this was tried in the past (if I remember correctly, some people kept making more and more treads for debating NR pretending to be general political threads; or maybe it was other way round and all general political threads were hijacked to debate NR).
In theory, it should be possible to debate politics rationally, but in practice, we have problems keeping the debates civilized.
I was running monthly politics threads. I don't recall that conversations involved NR specifically, but I do recall that the discussions taking place were so specific they had no general/popular appeal, and conversations were short, muted, and didn't go anywhere.
I was left reading the discussions taking place with the impression that people were looking for things to try to argue about, rather than having anything particularly meaningful they wanted to argue about which they previously couldn't. Given that one of my purposes was to try to arrange a safety valve for a perceived growing political pressure (which eventually exploded in the feminism war that got Eugine Nier banned and which caused most of the more prominent feminist-leaning members to leave), they were failing for my intended purpose, so I stopped creating them.
The debates didn't generally have an issue staying civilized, though, as I recall.