You make a good point, so I’ll try to be more clear about why starting a Health-care debate on LW would worry me.
Politics has a tendency to create what I call ‘bad entanglements’. An example would be the fact that in US politics there is a correlation between supporting Health Care and supporting Homosexual Marriage. There is no particular reason for this, I personally can’t see any inference by which one position can be derived from the other. This only happened because both issues were debated by the same people in the environment, and Blue and Green politics turned them into two sides each with their own position on both issues (and many others).
Overall, I would say this entanglement reduces the chance of an good resolution for either issue.
What I don’t want to see is the problem of Friendly AI developing its own bad entanglements. I have already seen this happening to some extent within Friendly, those who believe it is possible are more likely to believe its necessary and those who think its impossible tend to think its unnecessary (not yet a very strong correlation thankfully). This suggests we may not be good enough at rationality to avoid this problem yet.
Since the problem of bad entanglements seems quite difficult to excise, our best strategy is to focus on making sure it doesn’t get started, which can be done by not discussing too many controversial issues in one place. In fact, I would probably suggest that as a general policy for any community that actually wants to resolve the issues it discusses.
You make a good point, so I’ll try to be more clear about why starting a Health-care debate on LW would worry me.
Politics has a tendency to create what I call ‘bad entanglements’. An example would be the fact that in US politics there is a correlation between supporting Health Care and supporting Homosexual Marriage. There is no particular reason for this, I personally can’t see any inference by which one position can be derived from the other. This only happened because both issues were debated by the same people in the environment, and Blue and Green politics turned them into two sides each with their own position on both issues (and many others).
Overall, I would say this entanglement reduces the chance of an good resolution for either issue.
What I don’t want to see is the problem of Friendly AI developing its own bad entanglements. I have already seen this happening to some extent within Friendly, those who believe it is possible are more likely to believe its necessary and those who think its impossible tend to think its unnecessary (not yet a very strong correlation thankfully). This suggests we may not be good enough at rationality to avoid this problem yet.
Since the problem of bad entanglements seems quite difficult to excise, our best strategy is to focus on making sure it doesn’t get started, which can be done by not discussing too many controversial issues in one place. In fact, I would probably suggest that as a general policy for any community that actually wants to resolve the issues it discusses.