A few days ago, I came across a political screed posted here. If the rules are not merely, ‘no politics’, something stated more clearly, in an FAQ somewhere seems preferable. I’m sure this has been discussed a bit, but having some more clear guidelines that people can be directed to that are up to date (the old ‘no politics’ doesn’t seem clear enough) would be an improvement.
Yeah, reading your comment I found myself confused about how a post about a Canadian trucker convoy and the governmental response ended up on LW. I thought for a minute and remembered it was nominally a Covid protest.
When we made the choice to encourage Covid content in March 2020, one of the reasons was because I thought we’d play to our advantage because there was science and sometimes hard data involved, and I think that sort of thing has worked out somewhat nicely, especially in those early months and still now (e.g. Zvi trying to update on Omicron quickly). But there’s none of that in this post, so that particular heuristic doesn’t suggest that this content is unusually reliable here on LessWrong.
There’s been substantially more politicization and reading through the narrative-control than I expected in the last two years with Covid. I’ve learned a lot from Zvi’s writing on that, personally it’s been a surprisingly excellent learning experience. I think there’s a fair story where this stuff about a Canadian protest helps us understand a lot of the institutional attitude toward Covid, I do think that the institutional bankruptcy and dysfunction sort of ended up being the primary story of the last two years for me, and this is related to that. At the time I didn’t think we were making a decision to put the spotlight on such broader institutional dysfunction, and I think I’d be sad if that decision directly led to a lot more political content about current events, nominally related Covid but that were basically just about this perspective applied to current political goings-on.
For the record, this post hasn’t been frontpaged, and this sort of political content is entirely within-rules on personal blog. I’m thinking aloud here about the culture, not the current rules.
A few days ago, I came across a political screed posted here. If the rules are not merely, ‘no politics’, something stated more clearly, in an FAQ somewhere seems preferable. I’m sure this has been discussed a bit, but having some more clear guidelines that people can be directed to that are up to date (the old ‘no politics’ doesn’t seem clear enough) would be an improvement.
Yeah, reading your comment I found myself confused about how a post about a Canadian trucker convoy and the governmental response ended up on LW. I thought for a minute and remembered it was nominally a Covid protest.
When we made the choice to encourage Covid content in March 2020, one of the reasons was because I thought we’d play to our advantage because there was science and sometimes hard data involved, and I think that sort of thing has worked out somewhat nicely, especially in those early months and still now (e.g. Zvi trying to update on Omicron quickly). But there’s none of that in this post, so that particular heuristic doesn’t suggest that this content is unusually reliable here on LessWrong.
There’s been substantially more politicization and reading through the narrative-control than I expected in the last two years with Covid. I’ve learned a lot from Zvi’s writing on that, personally it’s been a surprisingly excellent learning experience. I think there’s a fair story where this stuff about a Canadian protest helps us understand a lot of the institutional attitude toward Covid, I do think that the institutional bankruptcy and dysfunction sort of ended up being the primary story of the last two years for me, and this is related to that. At the time I didn’t think we were making a decision to put the spotlight on such broader institutional dysfunction, and I think I’d be sad if that decision directly led to a lot more political content about current events, nominally related Covid but that were basically just about this perspective applied to current political goings-on.
For the record, this post hasn’t been frontpaged, and this sort of political content is entirely within-rules on personal blog. I’m thinking aloud here about the culture, not the current rules.
The rules were very clearly stated 15 years ago that politics are 100% on topic.
In case you didn’t see it, Zvi commented further up: