unless [...] categorization somehow is important to LW posts
Categorization is hugely relevant to Less Wrong! We had a whole Sequence about this!
Of course, it would be preferable to talk about the epistemology of categories with non-distracting examples if at all possible. One traditional strategy for avoiding such distractions is to abstract the meta-level point one is trying to make into a fictional parable about non-distracting things. See, for example, Scott Alexander’s “A Parable on Obsolete Ideologies”, which isn’t actually about Nazism—or rather, I would say, is about something more general than Nazism.
Unfortunately, this is extremely challenging to do well—most writers who attempt this strategy fail to be subtle enough, and the parable falls flat. For this they deserve to be downvoted.
So I think my filter for “appropriate to LessWrong” is that it should be an abstraction and generalization, NOT a parable or obfuscation to a specific topic. If there is a clean mapping to a current hotbutton, the author should do additional diligence to find counterexamples (the cases where more categories are costly, or where some dimensions are important for some uses and not for others, so you should use tagging rather than categorization) in order to actually define a concept rather than just restating a preference.
I think it is worth pointing out explicitly (though I expect most readers noticed) that Dagon wrote “unless gender categorization is important” and Zack turned it into “unless … categorization is important” and then said “Categorization is hugely relevant”. And that it’s perfectly possible that (1) a general topic can be highly relevant in a particular venue without it being true that (2) a specific case of that general topic is relevant there. And that most likely Dagon was not at all claiming that categorization is not an LW-relevant topic, but that gender categorization in particular is a too-distracting topic.
(I am not sure I agree with what I take Dagon’s position to be. Gender is a very interesting topic, and would be even if it weren’t one that many people feel very strongly about, and it relates to many very LW-ish topics—including, as Zack says, that of categorization more generally. Still, it might be that it’s just too distracting.)
The right word to elide from my objection would be “categorization”—I should have said “unless gender is important”, as that’s the political topic I don’t think we can/should discuss here. Categorization in mathematical abstraction is on-topic, as would be a formal definition/mapping of a relevant category to mathematically-expressible notation.
Loose, informal mappings of non-relevant topics is not useful here.
And honestly, I’m not sure how bright my line is—I can imagine topics related to gender or other human relationship topics that tend to bypass rationality being meta-discussed here, especially if it’s about raising the sanity waterline on such topics, and how to understand what goes wrong when they’re discussed at the object level. I doubt we’d get good results if we had direct object-level debates or points made here on those topics.
I think I roughly agree with this, though the LW team definitely hasn’t discussed this at length yet, and so this is just my personal opinion until I’ve properly checked in with the rest of the team.
Categorization is hugely relevant to Less Wrong! We had a whole Sequence about this!
Of course, it would be preferable to talk about the epistemology of categories with non-distracting examples if at all possible. One traditional strategy for avoiding such distractions is to abstract the meta-level point one is trying to make into a fictional parable about non-distracting things. See, for example, Scott Alexander’s “A Parable on Obsolete Ideologies”, which isn’t actually about Nazism—or rather, I would say, is about something more general than Nazism.
Unfortunately, this is extremely challenging to do well—most writers who attempt this strategy fail to be subtle enough, and the parable falls flat. For this they deserve to be downvoted.
So I think my filter for “appropriate to LessWrong” is that it should be an abstraction and generalization, NOT a parable or obfuscation to a specific topic. If there is a clean mapping to a current hotbutton, the author should do additional diligence to find counterexamples (the cases where more categories are costly, or where some dimensions are important for some uses and not for others, so you should use tagging rather than categorization) in order to actually define a concept rather than just restating a preference.
I think it is worth pointing out explicitly (though I expect most readers noticed) that Dagon wrote “unless gender categorization is important” and Zack turned it into “unless … categorization is important” and then said “Categorization is hugely relevant”. And that it’s perfectly possible that (1) a general topic can be highly relevant in a particular venue without it being true that (2) a specific case of that general topic is relevant there. And that most likely Dagon was not at all claiming that categorization is not an LW-relevant topic, but that gender categorization in particular is a too-distracting topic.
(I am not sure I agree with what I take Dagon’s position to be. Gender is a very interesting topic, and would be even if it weren’t one that many people feel very strongly about, and it relates to many very LW-ish topics—including, as Zack says, that of categorization more generally. Still, it might be that it’s just too distracting.)
The right word to elide from my objection would be “categorization”—I should have said “unless gender is important”, as that’s the political topic I don’t think we can/should discuss here. Categorization in mathematical abstraction is on-topic, as would be a formal definition/mapping of a relevant category to mathematically-expressible notation.
Loose, informal mappings of non-relevant topics is not useful here.
And honestly, I’m not sure how bright my line is—I can imagine topics related to gender or other human relationship topics that tend to bypass rationality being meta-discussed here, especially if it’s about raising the sanity waterline on such topics, and how to understand what goes wrong when they’re discussed at the object level. I doubt we’d get good results if we had direct object-level debates or points made here on those topics.
I think I roughly agree with this, though the LW team definitely hasn’t discussed this at length yet, and so this is just my personal opinion until I’ve properly checked in with the rest of the team.