I believe that the main reason why this hasn’t been discussed in any depth on Less Wrong is a) the norm set up by Elizier Yudkowsky in Politics is the Mindkiller b) The Motte has become the default rationalsphere adjacent location for this kind of discussion. That said, it’s plausible that the situation has reached the point where this topic can no longer be avoided.
a) the norm set up by Elizier Yudkowsky in Politics is the Mindkiller
Yeah, this is what I was referring to by “don’t feel that they have as much leeway to talk about politics-adjacent issues here as I do”. However, to clarify in case people get the wrong impression about current norms, one of the LW 2.0 admins has stated that it’s fine to post about politics here, they’ll just stay as “personal blogposts” (unfortunately I can’t find that comment now).
Today I am more worried about political talk attracting adversaries who will attack either individual members or LW as a whole (much like Scott Alexander was attacked/doxxed for being associated with Cultural War threads on Reddit), than being “mind-killed”.
b) The Motte has become the default rationalsphere adjacent location for this kind of discussion
The user base for The Motte seems mostly distinct from LW? At least I don’t recognize any names when I browse there.
Do you know of any relevant Motte posts on the question posed by the OP here?
That said, it’s plausible that the situation has reached the point where this topic can no longer be avoided.
I think so. I’m afraid that by avoiding talking about politics for so long and implicitly or explicitly encouraging people to not pay much attention to political news, we’ve caused many LWers who don’t come into contact with politics in their own lives often (like me until a few months ago) to have little idea how much worse things have gotten in the last few years. I’m especially worried about AI risk people who started with (what I think is) an already overly rosy picture of how sane the wider world is, and based their strategy on that.
I didn’t know the norm was different here. I like the old norm, for reasons that are a little hard to express. I guess political discussion is much more engaging than the stuff we usually talk about, so if it’s allowed I fear it will become a large proportion of overall discussion, to the cost of other topics. I don’t want people for whom Politics is their main hobby to feel like this place is of any interest at all to them. If such a person wanders across this place and finds a lot of discussion of theoretical computer science and decision theory, they will keep wandering. Having a load of discussions about what may or may not be wrong with people’s Politics feels to me like calling up something that we don’t know how to put down.
(I was waiting for a mod to chime in so I don’t have to, but …)
If such a person wanders across this place and finds a lot of discussion of theoretical computer science and decision theory, they will keep wandering.
I believe this is one of the reasons for confining political topics to “personal blogposts” which are not shown by default on the front page. My understanding is that they’re prepared to impose further measures to reduce engagement with political discussions if they start to get out of hand. I guess (this is just speaking for myself) that if worst comes to worst we can always just impose a hard ban on political topics.
(By “worst comes to worst” I mean in the sense of political discussions getting out of hand on LW. A worse problem, that I worry more about, is LW getting “canceled” by outsiders, in which case even banning political topics may be too late. I think we may want to pre-emptively impose more safeguards for that reason, like maybe making object-level political posts only visible to users over some karma threshold?)
one of the LW 2.0 admins has stated that it’s fine to post about politics here, they’ll just stay as “personal blogposts” (unfortunately I can’t find that comment now).
That’s roughly correct. The important caveat is that we do want to avoid the site being dominated by discussion of politics, and so are likely going to reduce the visibility of that discussion somewhat, in order to compensate for the natural tendencies of those topics to consume everything (I am not yet really sure how precisely we would go about that, since it hasn’t been an issue so far), and also because I really want to avoid newcomers first encountering all the political discussion (and selecting on newcomers who come for the political discussion).
I believe that the main reason why this hasn’t been discussed in any depth on Less Wrong is a) the norm set up by Elizier Yudkowsky in Politics is the Mindkiller b) The Motte has become the default rationalsphere adjacent location for this kind of discussion. That said, it’s plausible that the situation has reached the point where this topic can no longer be avoided.
Yeah, this is what I was referring to by “don’t feel that they have as much leeway to talk about politics-adjacent issues here as I do”. However, to clarify in case people get the wrong impression about current norms, one of the LW 2.0 admins has stated that it’s fine to post about politics here, they’ll just stay as “personal blogposts” (unfortunately I can’t find that comment now).
Today I am more worried about political talk attracting adversaries who will attack either individual members or LW as a whole (much like Scott Alexander was attacked/doxxed for being associated with Cultural War threads on Reddit), than being “mind-killed”.
The user base for The Motte seems mostly distinct from LW? At least I don’t recognize any names when I browse there.
Do you know of any relevant Motte posts on the question posed by the OP here?
I think so. I’m afraid that by avoiding talking about politics for so long and implicitly or explicitly encouraging people to not pay much attention to political news, we’ve caused many LWers who don’t come into contact with politics in their own lives often (like me until a few months ago) to have little idea how much worse things have gotten in the last few years. I’m especially worried about AI risk people who started with (what I think is) an already overly rosy picture of how sane the wider world is, and based their strategy on that.
I didn’t know the norm was different here. I like the old norm, for reasons that are a little hard to express. I guess political discussion is much more engaging than the stuff we usually talk about, so if it’s allowed I fear it will become a large proportion of overall discussion, to the cost of other topics. I don’t want people for whom Politics is their main hobby to feel like this place is of any interest at all to them. If such a person wanders across this place and finds a lot of discussion of theoretical computer science and decision theory, they will keep wandering. Having a load of discussions about what may or may not be wrong with people’s Politics feels to me like calling up something that we don’t know how to put down.
(I was waiting for a mod to chime in so I don’t have to, but …)
I believe this is one of the reasons for confining political topics to “personal blogposts” which are not shown by default on the front page. My understanding is that they’re prepared to impose further measures to reduce engagement with political discussions if they start to get out of hand. I guess (this is just speaking for myself) that if worst comes to worst we can always just impose a hard ban on political topics.
(By “worst comes to worst” I mean in the sense of political discussions getting out of hand on LW. A worse problem, that I worry more about, is LW getting “canceled” by outsiders, in which case even banning political topics may be too late. I think we may want to pre-emptively impose more safeguards for that reason, like maybe making object-level political posts only visible to users over some karma threshold?)
Oops, looks like we commented at the same time. You basically said the same thing I did, so I am glad we’re on the same page.
That’s roughly correct. The important caveat is that we do want to avoid the site being dominated by discussion of politics, and so are likely going to reduce the visibility of that discussion somewhat, in order to compensate for the natural tendencies of those topics to consume everything (I am not yet really sure how precisely we would go about that, since it hasn’t been an issue so far), and also because I really want to avoid newcomers first encountering all the political discussion (and selecting on newcomers who come for the political discussion).