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username2 comments on Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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My objections are not about having bias, but enacting a bias institutionally and through social pressures to shut up people you disagree with.
That impulse to shut others up by power and pressure has a marked tendency to go in one direction.
Your projection of "why don't these people all agree with me?" sounds ridiculous to me. Can you point to a few discussions where NR folks were shocked, just shocked, that there was someone in the world that disagreed with them? I'd think that they're probably well used to that by now. I wouldn't expect them to be shocked.
I'll share my conclusion. In many circles, the Left is accustomed to being able to proselytize their ideology while silencing Unbelievers. LW has a rare density of Libertarian leaning people, who generally aren't the types to sit silently and assent. Failing to ideologically bully, the Left resorted to pressure to just not talk about politics, which achieves the main goal of silencing the Unbelievers.
LessWrong is not supposed to be a claim, but a goal. We have all sorts of wrong ideas that we share and mutually critique on our path to becoming LessWrong. But for politics, no go. More important to shut up those heretical ideas than actually get LessWrong about them.
No. The desire to speak, and the desire to be free to speak without being pressured to shut up, is not the demand or expectation that everyone agree.
Yeah, the best approach is to UnIdea "neoreaction".
As for your suggested LWSpeak dictionary for political speech, that's conveniently another method of control. You can't use these symbols. You can't talk this way.
How about instead we criticize each other's ideas if we want, and don't criticize them if we don't?
According to LW census liberals and social democrats make up about two thirds of the whole population. If anything, the fact that talk about politics is discouraged here is good for ideological minorities, such as conservatives, communists or neoreactionaries, because there are plenty interesting LW topics that are unrelated to politics. A few years ago people understood that.
Discussing specific ideas one by one is different from discussing vague blobs of ideas that have a lot of connotations. The first one is much more productive than the second, because in the second case people tend to constantly move the goalposts and usė motte and bailey tactics. Discussion of specific mechanisms how elections may lead to outcomes that are contrary to the interest of population is different than discussing a vague blob of ideas that contain people as different as Moldbug's techno-commercialists and religious traditionalists who have basically nothing in common. For any neorectionary proposal there is another idea that is almost an opposite. You can't discuss it unless you specify exactly which ideas you are discussing. That is what tabooing the word "neoreaction" means. Discuss ideas that are specific and concrete, ideas that have empirical content, not some kind of vague symbols.
Is the implication that other third, made up of libertarians, wouldn't want to be in a political conversation where they are outnumbered?
If so, that's a pretty good joke.
"It's good that we don't talk about X, because there are a lot of NotX things to talk about" is a rather peculiar claim.
I suppose one could argue that Trump the political animal is in fact a vague blob of ideas, but as a topic of conversation, it's fairly specific, and yet the poster asking for permission to discuss him was effectively told to "shut up" by 40% of respondents. And he did so.
But that is not what "shut up" means.
Can he discuss Trump, as long as he doesn't use his name? Shall it be "He Who Must Not Be Named" then?