Looking at this topic more broadly than solely in terms of HPMOR and it's reviews, I would argue that for many people their exposure to the concept of rationality is predominantly made up of half rationalists.
Rationality is hard. It gives us tools that allow us to update old preconceptions of the world. However in practice we will often fail in our rationality due to insufficient information or other cognitive limits while still identifying our actions as being superior due to rational principles. It is very off putting to see others claiming superiority...
I think it's more that there seems to be a cluster that will vocally declare anything that is short of the clinical definition of PTSD trigger, to be completely invalid morally. IE there is no moral value or obligation to markup our language with these warnings and it is completely the responsibility of others to toughen up and handle it.
This is in opposition to the viewpoint of side two who argue that we should invest effort to create more pleasant and safer environments.
Hence side 2 and 3 argue different moral claims while side 1 associates the term without considering moral obligations in the use of language.
You might want to make the signal hard to find. If it's your test for intelligence, the harder it is to find the alpha mail and construct a response, the higher the level of intelligence it would select for.
Maybe no puzzles are seen from our perspective simply because we aren't on the order of magnitude of the level of intelligence that any who have the power to simulate a universe like ours would be looking for.
I do think there exist quite a large number of groups who would fall into the category of the politics tribe. In fact from what I've seen much of the spectrum of social activists.
From there point of view they may identify the status quo that is considered apolitical from the main stream point of view, to in fact have harmful effects for some. On these issues they identify 3 groups.
Those who agree with them that the status quo has issues. Those who disagree and wish to actively maintain the status quo. Those who have not engaged with the issue but inadvertently are supporting their political enemies due to Status Quo Bias
I think at least in my case, what associations I have behind the symbol "politics" is a bit different from the way you view it. I see how your arguments are consistent from that perspective, so I think that a lot of the difference in view might come from that difference.
In my view something that is political need not be something related to any formal party politics, but includes the set of any group power dynamics.
In my case I can imagine political people as both people who are interested in partisan conflicts, but also I would consider the main skill of managers of people to fundamentally be to manage the politics of the group.
As a continuation of that idea though. One of the prerequisites of factionalization / triblization is the existence in enough variance in viewpoints to create distinct independent clusters. Others in the same cluster become the in group, and those outside of the cluster become the out group.
However, while variance is required for clustering, clustering isn't always present with high variance. You can still have more uniform distributions with large spreads.
Being aware that clustering effects are more likely in areas of high variance seems to me to a a good heuristic to internalize.
I wonder if the number of comments might be a better heuristic for measuring the variance in people's perspective on the article. If you look at those 3 examples, the first had the most comments, but the least upvotes and lowest percentage positive.
If someone feels that they are in agreement and their viewpoint is already present in the discussion they might have a lower likelihood of adding another comment, but if there is a larger variance in the viewpoints on an issue than people would be more likely to have what they feel is unique information to add to the discussion.
As a less wrong lurker this thread did a great job at putting into words the main reason I've been very hesitant to get more involved with the community.
I do think that anything politic is some of the hardest materiel to have any sort of discussion about while remaining rational and effective and not falling prey to our bias.
On the other hand from my experience I strongly agree that what is and isn't political is highly contextual and variable for different people. I worry that the aggregate limits of what can and cannot be discussed as political are to ...
I've also went from a steady 23 total karma all in dead posts from a couple of weeks ago, and went down to 14 after posting this. I'm still rather new here, but I do remember reading that downvote stalking had become an issue in the past. Did LW ever resolve any policies to help combat that?