I didn’t know we are allowed to discuss politics here. I thought that was banned? Sorry I didn’t see the previous post. Anyway, here are some intellectual contributions:
For much of the twentieth century mass media was policed by The Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was a policy that required media outlets to cover controversial issues in a balanced manner that represented both sides of the argument. This was used against populist broadcasters like Carl McIntire (like a more Catholic version of Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh who also opposed the Civil Rights Movement).
The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints.[1] In 1987, the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine,[2] prompting some to urge its reintroduction through either Commission policy or congressional legislation.[3] The FCC removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011.[4]
Rush Limbaugh’s radio program went national shortly after Reagan abolished the policy in 1987:
The FCC’s repeal of the fairness doctrine—which had required that stations provide free air time for responses to any controversial opinions that were broadcast—on August 5, 1987, meant stations could broadcast editorial commentary without having to present opposing views. Daniel Henninger wrote, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, “Ronald Reagan tore down this wall [the fairness doctrine] in 1987 … and Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination.”[32]
Media outlets have incentives to sensationalize the news to agree with their audiences’ preconceived notions, amplifying political polarization. There was a period in the 20th century when The New York Times brought the rigor of academic science to news reportage by literally hiring an astrophysicist to be the editor (Carr Van Anda was hired by Adolf Ochs soon after Ochs’s purchase of the NYT), but that was a lucky aberration and needed to be sustained for much of the twentieth century by The Fairness Doctrine (and funding through advertisers interested in selling products rather than subscriptions from readers that want to have their beliefs confirmed).
While attempts to stifle intellectual discussion on sensitive topics has been present for a long time on the extreme political Left the last approximately fifteen years represent a sudden increase in the prevalence and force of these attempts. This Tablet article by Zach Goldberg documents statistical evidence of a cultural shift at some point near the middle of the previous decade. Usage of terms related to racism in major newspapers increased as much as 1500% in this period. While Goldberg does not mention it in the article, the triggering events for this phenomena in the data seem to definitely be the formation of Black Lives Matter and their first major actions in 2014. In particular, the fact that the Eric Garner incident took place in New York and the New York Times in addition to being highly influential is also one of the papers included in Goldberg’s analysis likely means this is the source of the spike in coverage and larger cultural shift.
In July 2013, the movement began with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin 17 months earlier, in February 2012. The movement became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two African Americans: Michael Brown—resulting in protests and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, a city near St. Louis—and Eric Garner in New York City.
James Douglas Bennett argues persuasively that this shift in news coverage was due to a change in the financial model of the NYT, specifically that the shift to paywalled subscription demanded playing to the audience’s political leanings:
It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism. I recall his astonishment, fairly early in the Trump administration, after Times reporters conducted an interview with Trump. Subscribers were angry about the questions the Times had asked. It was as if they’d only be satisfied, Baquet said, if the reporters leaped across the desk and tried to wring the president’s neck. The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.
There are also evident cultural shifts with regards to free speech in the general population in this same time period which seem to be a result of this elite-led shift. The Tablet article by Goldberg linked above briefly mentions data from the General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS gathers data on a set of questions measuring “Free Speech Values” among the American populace. The phenomenon seems to be limited to race issues; the GSS also collects data on Free Speech tolerance of Communist, Militarist, Homosexual, and Muslim expression and it is exclusively with Free Speech tolerance of Racism that we see a notable decrease of tolerance starting sometime between 2012 and 2014. It is also notable that this decrease in tolerance was especially pronounced among the most educated respondents. In 2012 college educated respondents favored removal of a racist book from libraries at a rate of 26%, the preference for removal peaked in 2022 at 43% although in 2024 (the most recent available data) it slightly ticked back to 41%.
(The data is under the “free speech” subheading under “Civil Liberties,” you must use the drop-down menu to get to these questions. Direct links are unfortunately not possible on the contemporary GSS site. Of course this is also in the raw data.)
I’d also be remiss if I don’t mention the association of wealth inequality with political extremism. There seems to be a regular historical coincidence between periods of high economic inequality and political extremism, such as the early part of the twentienth century. Both communism and the KKK had periods of high popularity in early 20th century America (and of course Europe had its own more consequential extremism at that time as well). The mechanisms for this association are more difficult to trace than for direct media regulation or behavior.
So my argument is that the change in political culture observed recently from the more openly liberal popular discussion of the mid-twentieth century is due to abolishing The Fairness Doctrine which allowed media outlets to pander to their audiences’ worst most self-absorbed flaws for profit. This directly leads to a change in wider culture. Furthermore, we should be concerned about economic inequality as this is likely an important contributing factor to political extremism.
I didn’t know we are allowed to discuss politics here.
Politics in the American political horse-race sense (for non-Americans this means political party competition between Republicans and Democrats) and of the “yay political ingroup, boo political outgroup” in general remains at least taboo, and rightly would be downvoted into oblivion even where it isn’t strictly banned.
But the fully general “politics is the mindkiller” blanket ban on even mentioning politically connected subjects hasn’t been true for years. Among other things, AI is now a highly political subject, but analyzing administrative actions surrounding it, policy consequences, even things like actual political campaigns aimed at legislation (like the vetoed California law) are completely fair game. Direct political science style questions have been popular for years.
At this point, I claim our norms are strong enough that political topics are fine, provided they otherwise follow the norms. I would still support the mods nuking any posts that come pre-mindkilled, of course.
I don’t see it happen often, which is probably a combination of pre-mindkilled people not being attracted to LessWrong, our reputation for being intolerant of it proceeding us, and our mod team being very good.
I didn’t know we are allowed to discuss politics here. I thought that was banned? Sorry I didn’t see the previous post. Anyway, here are some intellectual contributions:
For much of the twentieth century mass media was policed by The Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was a policy that required media outlets to cover controversial issues in a balanced manner that represented both sides of the argument. This was used against populist broadcasters like Carl McIntire (like a more Catholic version of Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh who also opposed the Civil Rights Movement).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
Rush Limbaugh’s radio program went national shortly after Reagan abolished the policy in 1987:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh
Media outlets have incentives to sensationalize the news to agree with their audiences’ preconceived notions, amplifying political polarization. There was a period in the 20th century when The New York Times brought the rigor of academic science to news reportage by literally hiring an astrophysicist to be the editor (Carr Van Anda was hired by Adolf Ochs soon after Ochs’s purchase of the NYT), but that was a lucky aberration and needed to be sustained for much of the twentieth century by The Fairness Doctrine (and funding through advertisers interested in selling products rather than subscriptions from readers that want to have their beliefs confirmed).
While attempts to stifle intellectual discussion on sensitive topics has been present for a long time on the extreme political Left the last approximately fifteen years represent a sudden increase in the prevalence and force of these attempts. This Tablet article by Zach Goldberg documents statistical evidence of a cultural shift at some point near the middle of the previous decade. Usage of terms related to racism in major newspapers increased as much as 1500% in this period. While Goldberg does not mention it in the article, the triggering events for this phenomena in the data seem to definitely be the formation of Black Lives Matter and their first major actions in 2014. In particular, the fact that the Eric Garner incident took place in New York and the New York Times in addition to being highly influential is also one of the papers included in Goldberg’s analysis likely means this is the source of the spike in coverage and larger cultural shift.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter
James Douglas Bennett argues persuasively that this shift in news coverage was due to a change in the financial model of the NYT, specifically that the shift to paywalled subscription demanded playing to the audience’s political leanings:
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
There are also evident cultural shifts with regards to free speech in the general population in this same time period which seem to be a result of this elite-led shift. The Tablet article by Goldberg linked above briefly mentions data from the General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS gathers data on a set of questions measuring “Free Speech Values” among the American populace. The phenomenon seems to be limited to race issues; the GSS also collects data on Free Speech tolerance of Communist, Militarist, Homosexual, and Muslim expression and it is exclusively with Free Speech tolerance of Racism that we see a notable decrease of tolerance starting sometime between 2012 and 2014. It is also notable that this decrease in tolerance was especially pronounced among the most educated respondents. In 2012 college educated respondents favored removal of a racist book from libraries at a rate of 26%, the preference for removal peaked in 2022 at 43% although in 2024 (the most recent available data) it slightly ticked back to 41%.
https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends
(The data is under the “free speech” subheading under “Civil Liberties,” you must use the drop-down menu to get to these questions. Direct links are unfortunately not possible on the contemporary GSS site. Of course this is also in the raw data.)
I’d also be remiss if I don’t mention the association of wealth inequality with political extremism. There seems to be a regular historical coincidence between periods of high economic inequality and political extremism, such as the early part of the twentienth century. Both communism and the KKK had periods of high popularity in early 20th century America (and of course Europe had its own more consequential extremism at that time as well). The mechanisms for this association are more difficult to trace than for direct media regulation or behavior.
So my argument is that the change in political culture observed recently from the more openly liberal popular discussion of the mid-twentieth century is due to abolishing The Fairness Doctrine which allowed media outlets to pander to their audiences’ worst most self-absorbed flaws for profit. This directly leads to a change in wider culture. Furthermore, we should be concerned about economic inequality as this is likely an important contributing factor to political extremism.
Politics in the American political horse-race sense (for non-Americans this means political party competition between Republicans and Democrats) and of the “yay political ingroup, boo political outgroup” in general remains at least taboo, and rightly would be downvoted into oblivion even where it isn’t strictly banned.
But the fully general “politics is the mindkiller” blanket ban on even mentioning politically connected subjects hasn’t been true for years. Among other things, AI is now a highly political subject, but analyzing administrative actions surrounding it, policy consequences, even things like actual political campaigns aimed at legislation (like the vetoed California law) are completely fair game. Direct political science style questions have been popular for years.
At this point, I claim our norms are strong enough that political topics are fine, provided they otherwise follow the norms. I would still support the mods nuking any posts that come pre-mindkilled, of course.
I don’t see it happen often, which is probably a combination of pre-mindkilled people not being attracted to LessWrong, our reputation for being intolerant of it proceeding us, and our mod team being very good.
Well that’s it. I guess I am making this a frontpage post now.
It isn’t banned, it’s discouraged. Politics is the Mind-Killer so we try to avoid it.