It’s inappropriate to treat politics as a separate magisterium. There’s nothing exceptional about the tools we apply to the topic: we’ve discussed collective action problems, social signaling, and defense against rhetoric and marketing at length here, all mostly without making recourse to their political applications.
LWers can learn to discuss politics rationally by building skill in the techniques appropriate to political discussion. Using political examples directly could be expected to do this efficiently iff we successfully manage to keep the discussion on the techniques themselves, but politics is loaded with so much bias that that’s an exceptionally difficult task; if we can’t hack it, the better option overall is to train on less efficient but less distracting examples.
It’s inappropriate to treat politics as a separate magisterium. There’s nothing exceptional about the tools we apply to the topic: we’ve discussed collective action problems, social signaling, and defense against rhetoric and marketing at length here, all mostly without making recourse to their political applications.
LWers can learn to discuss politics rationally by building skill in the techniques appropriate to political discussion. Using political examples directly could be expected to do this efficiently iff we successfully manage to keep the discussion on the techniques themselves, but politics is loaded with so much bias that that’s an exceptionally difficult task; if we can’t hack it, the better option overall is to train on less efficient but less distracting examples.