Let’s talk about politics
Hello fellow LWs,
As I have read repeatedly on LW (http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/) you don’t like discussing politics because it produces biased thinking/arguing which I agree is true for the general populace. What I find curious is that you don’t seem to even try it here where people would be very likely to keep their identities small (www.paulgraham.com/identity.html). It should be the perfect (or close enough) environment to talk politics because you can have reasonable discussions here.
I do understand that you don’t like to bring politics into discussions about rationality, but I don’t understand why there shouldn’t be dedicated political threads here. (Maybe you could flag them?)
all the best
Viper
We actually have those, sometimes.
As for “dedicated political threads,” I never click on them, because I don’t want my opinions of other posters to be colored by my knowledge of their politics.
But that doesn’t explain (entirely) why there are no political threads. A better explanation is (I guess) that you downvote everything that has the word politics in it.
The reason I don’t like to talk politics isn’t actually because I don’t trust y’all—although boorish people are sometimes around. Instead, it’s because I can handle two or three sides of a conversation on my own. I’m happy to learn from someone who knows a lot about something. I’m happy to try and teach people who want to know more about some political issue I know about. I’m happy to make fun of dumb political stuff. But if someone knows pretty much the same stuff I know, there’s no interest in each of us sticking to just one side in a conversation.
Agreement on politics doesn’t seem to be an issue here. You may not be able to get people saying they’re Democrats/Republicans/Libertarians/Socialists/Moldbuggers (cause, y’know, group affiliations are low status round here), but on actual questions of policy or political philosophy people are more than happy to argue.
Oh, I’m a Democrat :P
I am saying that I am not particularly happy to argue.
You seem to assume that we LWers are somehow immune to having bad political discussions. This is a false assumption.
I never said that we are immune, I said that there was potential for good political discussions not that there would be no bad ones. And I wanted to ask a question, not state that you are all wrong and stupid.
True.
Here’s what you did say:
I think this is overly optimistic. (Thus I do not feel as though you’ve called me, or anyone else here, stupid. Rather, I think you’ve overestimated our reasonableness on a political topic.)
I may have been overly optimistic. I was just stating my confusion about the fact that this chance (people with different political opinions and small identities that are interested in finding the truth and like to discuss on a fair basis) has not been used (much) to discuss politics.
I guess with “perfect” I meant that it is one of the best places you can find, not that it is really perfect.
You’ve pointed out two phenomena that are surely related:
People around here have small identities, are interested in finding the truth, and like to discuss on a fair basis.
People around here are not amenable to discussing politics.
I think the relationship is at least partially causal, with 1 causing 2. Speaking for myself anyway, political discussion is frustrating (and yet very enjoyable!), because I find it so hard to even articulate the query, let alone hug it.
If I were to get into a political discussion, I might end up polluting more than clarifying, despite what I would feel were my best efforts. I suspect others here might feel similarly about their own potential for political discussion.
That is the sort of answer I was aiming for when I was writing the post. I genuinely wanted to know why you don’t have those discussions and this is an interesting reason.
Fair enough. Next time, perhaps you should just say so. Your post seemed to advocate them, not just ask about them. This is, I think, the major reason for the downvoting. (Another big one is the lack of reference to the political threads that actually do appear occasionally.)
Well the intention was indeed twofold. Firstly advocate the possibility for good political discussions (because then, and to a lesser extent now, I thought that it would be good to have them) and genuinely ask why you don’t have them.
As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s worth taking the second-order effects into account.
That is, suppose I accept for the sake of comity that LW’s exceptional discussion-having abilities would be well-used discussing partisan national politics. (In actual fact I’m unconvinced of this, given what I’ve seen of it.)
I should still ask myself what kinds of people will join LW if we start regularly discussing such issues who would not otherwise join, and what effect they will have on our exceptional discussion-having abilities.
My prediction, given that we’re an open-registration forum on the Internet, is that it will net degrade those abilities.
I realise more and more that I did not phrase my question/query very well. What I meant with a political discussion was that you have a general issue and you try to find either the truth or a consens if possible. So I don’t want to discuss Democrats vs Republicans (I am German anyway) but talk about certain issues that you would not want to discuss, because they are “political”. (e.g. same sex marriage, how to minimise poverty etc.)
If you want to discuss a topic without reference to partisan national politics, I’d recommend you do so and see what happens. I expect that for the most part, if the topic is one of genuine interest, you’ll get a discussion about it.
That said, it’s worth paying attention to what makes certain topics seem interesting in the first place.
I discuss same-sex marriage on this site not-infrequently, for example. That’s because I happen to be in one, and we often discuss relationship dynamics. I don’t generally get downvoted for it.
OTOH, if I were to start talking about legalizing same-sex marriage in America in the abstract, the most plausible explanation for why I was talking about this would be because it has become a partisan political question in an election year. If I wanted to talk about it for some other reason, I would make a distinct effort to frame it so that my real reasons were immediately clear.
I would also look skeptically at my own belief that those really were my real reasons.
Is there an online community that has good political discussions?
I have seen good political discussions in online communities (on Crooked Timber, for example), but usually these are communities where the members have fairly homogeneous political views. When the participants in the discussion see one another as members of the same tribe, I think mind-killing is less likely.
Except when a member of another political tribe wanders in. Then it’s “Kill the heretic!”, usually under the pretence that the outsider has introduced politics into the matter.