No, the “pleasant tone” is a strawman. I am speaking about a difference between:
a) suggesting to fix a problem directly; and
b) suggesting that your tribe should be given more power, and then your tribe will fix the problem.
The proponents of the latter solution may believe that all solutions of the former type are obviously doomed to fail, thus they are not even worth considering. (Motivated stopping.) Or even invent rationalizations about how all solutions that don’t give more power to their tribe would actually make the whole problem worse.
EDIT: There is usually also a lack of specific details. Let’s say that every mention of politically incorrect topics on LW would be banned, and that feminism would become an official belief and moderation policy. How specifically would that bring to LW more women interested in artificial intelligence and rationality (as opposed to merely interested in evangelizing feminism among people interested in rationality). Uhm… I guess there is only this vague belief that what is good for feminism is by definition good for women, therefore the problem will either magically fix itself, or we will have to find some other guy to blame. (Maybe after a few iterations we will decide that Eliezer’s writings are irrepairably sexist, or maybe that the whole idea of rationality was just rich white cishet males’ invention to oppress the voodoo believers.)
No, the “pleasant tone” is a strawman. I am speaking about a difference between:
a) suggesting to fix a problem directly; and
b) suggesting that your tribe should be given more power, and then your tribe will fix the problem.
The proponents of the latter solution may believe that all solutions of the former type are obviously doomed to fail, thus they are not even worth considering. (Motivated stopping.) Or even invent rationalizations about how all solutions that don’t give more power to their tribe would actually make the whole problem worse.
EDIT: There is usually also a lack of specific details. Let’s say that every mention of politically incorrect topics on LW would be banned, and that feminism would become an official belief and moderation policy. How specifically would that bring to LW more women interested in artificial intelligence and rationality (as opposed to merely interested in evangelizing feminism among people interested in rationality). Uhm… I guess there is only this vague belief that what is good for feminism is by definition good for women, therefore the problem will either magically fix itself, or we will have to find some other guy to blame. (Maybe after a few iterations we will decide that Eliezer’s writings are irrepairably sexist, or maybe that the whole idea of rationality was just rich white cishet males’ invention to oppress the voodoo believers.)