I think a very interesting trait of humans is that we can for the most part collaboratively truth-seek on most issues, except those defined as ‘politics’, where a large proportion of the population, with varying IQs, some extremely intelligent, believe things that are quite obviously wrong to who anyone who has spent any amount of time seeking the truth on those issues without prior bias.
The ability for humans to totally turn off their rationality, to organise the ‘facts’ as they see them to confirm their biases, is nothing short of incredible. If humans treated everything like politics, we would certainly get nowhere.
I think a community hazard would, unfortunately, be trying to collaboratively truth-seek about political issues on a forum like LessWrong. People would not be able to get over their biases, despite being very open to changing their mind on all other issues.
we can for the most part collaboratively truth-seek on most issues, except those defined as ‘politics’,
This is true not only connotationally (political topics cause humans to behave this way), but also denotationally: those topics which cause humans to behave this way, we call political (or ‘tribal’).
Nope. Consider the whole wide world of incentives. If a discussion leads to significant real-world results, and not just of political kind, participants have incentives to attempt turn this discussion to their advantage and they regularly do. Truth-seeking is a very common casualty.
Is this really true? It seems that humans have the capacity to endlessly debate many issues, without changing their minds. Including philosophy, religion, scientific debates, conspiracy theories, and even math, on occasion. Almost any subject can create deeply nested comment threads of people going back and forth debating. Hell I might even be starting one of those right now, with this comment.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about politics. Lesswrong has gotten away with horribly controversial things before, like e.g. torture vs dust specks, or AI Risk, etc. There have even been political subjects on occasion.
I’d just say it’s off topic. I don’t come to Lesswrong to read about politics. I get that from almost everywhere else. Lesswrong doesn’t really have anything to add.
But maybe if there is a political issue that either isn’t too controversial, or isn’t too mainstream, I wouldn’t mind it being discussed here. E.g. there are sometimes discussions about genetically engineered babies, and that even fits well with other lesswrong subjects.
a very interesting trait of humans is that we can for the most part collaboratively truth-seek on most issues, except those defined as ‘politics’
That looks to me to be just false. A trivial counterexample: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”—Upton Sinclair.
I think a very interesting trait of humans is that we can for the most part collaboratively truth-seek on most issues, except those defined as ‘politics’, where a large proportion of the population, with varying IQs, some extremely intelligent, believe things that are quite obviously wrong to who anyone who has spent any amount of time seeking the truth on those issues without prior bias.
The ability for humans to totally turn off their rationality, to organise the ‘facts’ as they see them to confirm their biases, is nothing short of incredible. If humans treated everything like politics, we would certainly get nowhere.
I think a community hazard would, unfortunately, be trying to collaboratively truth-seek about political issues on a forum like LessWrong. People would not be able to get over their biases, despite being very open to changing their mind on all other issues.
This is true not only connotationally (political topics cause humans to behave this way), but also denotationally: those topics which cause humans to behave this way, we call political (or ‘tribal’).
Nope. Consider the whole wide world of incentives. If a discussion leads to significant real-world results, and not just of political kind, participants have incentives to attempt turn this discussion to their advantage and they regularly do. Truth-seeking is a very common casualty.
For simple examples think about money, sex, etc.
Yeah, good point there. That’s why it might work in a small private setting of an LW meetup, but not so much on the open forum of LW.
Is this really true? It seems that humans have the capacity to endlessly debate many issues, without changing their minds. Including philosophy, religion, scientific debates, conspiracy theories, and even math, on occasion. Almost any subject can create deeply nested comment threads of people going back and forth debating. Hell I might even be starting one of those right now, with this comment.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about politics. Lesswrong has gotten away with horribly controversial things before, like e.g. torture vs dust specks, or AI Risk, etc. There have even been political subjects on occasion.
I’d just say it’s off topic. I don’t come to Lesswrong to read about politics. I get that from almost everywhere else. Lesswrong doesn’t really have anything to add.
But maybe if there is a political issue that either isn’t too controversial, or isn’t too mainstream, I wouldn’t mind it being discussed here. E.g. there are sometimes discussions about genetically engineered babies, and that even fits well with other lesswrong subjects.
That looks to me to be just false. A trivial counterexample: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”—Upton Sinclair.