I'm aware there are some sensitive subjects that have been debated to death among rationalists, if not on LessWrong, than elsewhere online, such that it would in general be fruitless to start the conversation over instead of following what has been debated thus far. I'm curious if this is considered to apply to potentially literally any single socially, culturally or politically sensitive subject. It has been several years since I've checked but my impression from before is that the prevailing norm on LessWrong was based on a particular interpretation of "Politics is the Mind-Killer" that amounts to "politics=anti-rational=downvote on site." This seems contradicted by the original post:
I’m not saying that I think we should be apolitical, or even that we should adopt Wikipedia’s ideal of the Neutral Point of View. But try to resist getting in those good, solid digs if you can possibly avoid it. If your topic legitimately relates to attempts to ban evolution in school curricula, then go ahead and talk about it—but don’t blame it explicitly on the whole Republican Party; some of your readers may be Republicans, and they may feel that the problem is a few rogues, not the entire party.
It seems like the alternative interpretation, though, was adopted because nobody stuck to that and so it was more convenient for reinforcing norms of civility in discourse to go with the "politics=anti-rational=downvote" interpretation.
Is that still a norm? Even if someone like myself posts about it in a way that doesn't suck, is the concern still that others will lower the quality of discourse with their comments, and downvote anyway? (I'm aware there are not formal rules but I'm in essence asking if according to social norms what categories of topics are considered forbidden by default.)
I meant to include the hyperlink to the original source in my post but I forgot to, so thanks for catching that. I've now added it to the OP.
It seems like the kind of post I have in mind would be respected more if I'm willing and prepared to put in the effort of moderating the comments well too. I won't make such a post before I'm ready to commit the time and effort to doing so. Thank you for being so direct about why you suspect I'm wrong. Voluntary explanations for the crux of a disagreement or a perception of irrationality are not provided on LessWrong nearly often enough.