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?)
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.