It’s unclear to me that this is that LW specific. If you asked any large sample of western Internet users for anonymous and unaccountable statements of controversial opinions would you get results that are that different? If not, then it’s more a description of the Internet.
The only thing that’s LW specific is the suggestion that the most effective use of rationality is going to be politics.
I guess satt’s point is that back in 2010 that stuff wasn’t discussed outside “Closet survey” and threads like that, whereas more recently people have done that in otherwise regular threads causing some drama and mind-killing (though IMO certain LWers overstate the extent to which this is a problem).
Keeping discussions of potentially mind-killing topics quarantined to specially designated threads may be a superior solution to either banning them altogether or allowing them throughout the site.
My point was more that I had a causal model in my head (much higher proportion of LWers thinking/talking about controversial topics in 2012 → more LW drama in 2012), but realized it was wrong when I read the comments here, felt confused, and noticedI was confused. (It’s a pretty mundane example of noticing confusion but I doubt I’m the only one whose mental model was wrong in this way.)
Coincidentally, I just found a sort of similar post by taw when I was idly Googling “reference class tennis”. It mentions climate change scientists as examples of politicized science, and namedrops “race and IQ, nuclear winter, and pretty much everything in macroeconomics” as times when “such science was completely wrong”. Also, although taw’s ultimate point was actually about reference class forecasting, a lot of the comments focused on his object-level examples of scientific controversy instead. That happened back in 2009 as well.
As for what to do about drama, I’ll hold off on making suggestions. It’s not something top-down policy is likely to fix without unhappy side effects, and LW’s ultimately an entertainment device for me (albeit one that sometimes makes me think). If it turns into something un-fun, I’ll just go and procrastinate with something else.
It’s unclear to me that this is that LW specific. If you asked any large sample of western Internet users for anonymous and unaccountable statements of controversial opinions would you get results that are that different? If not, then it’s more a description of the Internet.
The only thing that’s LW specific is the suggestion that the most effective use of rationality is going to be politics.
I guess satt’s point is that back in 2010 that stuff wasn’t discussed outside “Closet survey” and threads like that, whereas more recently people have done that in otherwise regular threads causing some drama and mind-killing (though IMO certain LWers overstate the extent to which this is a problem).
Keeping discussions of potentially mind-killing topics quarantined to specially designated threads may be a superior solution to either banning them altogether or allowing them throughout the site.
My point was more that I had a causal model in my head (much higher proportion of LWers thinking/talking about controversial topics in 2012 → more LW drama in 2012), but realized it was wrong when I read the comments here, felt confused, and noticed I was confused. (It’s a pretty mundane example of noticing confusion but I doubt I’m the only one whose mental model was wrong in this way.)
Coincidentally, I just found a sort of similar post by taw when I was idly Googling “reference class tennis”. It mentions climate change scientists as examples of politicized science, and namedrops “race and IQ, nuclear winter, and pretty much everything in macroeconomics” as times when “such science was completely wrong”. Also, although taw’s ultimate point was actually about reference class forecasting, a lot of the comments focused on his object-level examples of scientific controversy instead. That happened back in 2009 as well.
As for what to do about drama, I’ll hold off on making suggestions. It’s not something top-down policy is likely to fix without unhappy side effects, and LW’s ultimately an entertainment device for me (albeit one that sometimes makes me think). If it turns into something un-fun, I’ll just go and procrastinate with something else.