... of LW: a while ago, a former boss and friend of mine said that rationality is irrational because you never have sufficient computational power to evaluate everything rationally. I thought he was missing the point - but after two posts on LW, I am inclined to agree with him.
It's kind of funny - every post gets broken down into its tiniest constituents, and these get overanalysed and then people go on tangents only marginally relevant to the intent of the original article.
This would be fine if the original questions of the post were answered; but when I asked for metrics to evaluate a presidency, few people actually provided any - most started debating the validity of metrics, and one subthread went off to discuss the appropriateness of the term "gender equality".
I am new here, and I don't want to be overly critical of a culture I do not yet understand. But I just want to point out - rationality is a great tool to solve problems; if it becomes overly abstract, it kind of misses its point I think.
LW is a forum for discussing the art of rationality. It's not primarily a forum for discussing politics. If someone writes a post about politics that implies misconceptions about how we can determine causality, it makes sense to focus on the misconception about determining causality instead of ignoring it and stepping into the more political issues.
If you want the usual way to discuss politics there are plenty of other places on the internet.
If LW would simply debate politics on the term of every outsider to LW who wants to discuss politics on LW that would allow a lot of bad reasoning about politics into LW.