I expect that this reply will be downvoted, given the tone of existing replies, but I don’t think turning LessWrong into a partisan colony is a good thing.
I hope your faith in LessWrong has been restored somewhat. If replies with well-researched specific examples relevant to the discussion got downvoted, there would be no point reading LW anymore.
(Also like, come on, braverydebates etc. Ah, I see you are kinda new here. The more you disagree on this website, the more karma you get… if you can keep it polite, smart, and supported by evidence, of course.)
For one, it means that half of America will inherently view everything LW wants as enemy.
I think this ship has sailed long ago, given that the website is explicitly and unashamedly atheist.
Politically, however, the typical criticism from outside has always been that we tolerate too many opinions.
(Also like, come on, braverydebates etc. Ah, I see you are kinda new here. The more you disagree on this website, the more karma you get… if you can keep it polite, smart, and supported by evidence, of course.)
I’d describe this “good criticism gets upvoted, good ingroup-rah-rah gets upvoted, bad criticism gets downvoted, bad ingroup-rah-rah often gets weak upvoted.” Which I don’t like but am not sure what to do about it.
Mediocre criticism can get plenty of upvotes as long as it’s a culture fit.
If the author does a good job of pitching it to Less Wrongers, then the critical post can activate readers’ it’s virtuous to be open-minded mindset and turn their critical faculties towards the thing that the post is criticizing and away from the post itself. So instead of evaluating the post according to their ordinary standards of epistemics and quality, they instead try to find anything in it that seems good / insightful / overly neglected / provoking of new useful thoughts / on a promising track.
It’s not perfect, but compared to most of the internet, even most of the smarter parts of the internet, we are trying, and the difference is visible. Sometimes bad things get upvoted, but at least a well-written criticism supported by references gets upvoted, too.
Obviously (given the word “bipartisan” in the title), the goal here is not to defeat Republicans at all costs and start a glorious thousand-years era of wokeness. Which already makes it different from a typical anti-Trump debate. This is not about tribes, it is about destruction of the existing political order by one wannabe dictator, whose actions are atypical even for his own political party.
In this context, naming the bad actions of the other side is good—you won’t get bipartisan support against “bad things that Republicans do”. If this is something that every Republican would say when asked to support the resistance, we better be prepared for that in advance. Admit that in the past mistakes were made by both sides, but now things are getting completely out of control, so we need to agree on some common foundation of how we want thing to function. That includes calling out the previous defections against this common foundation, on both sides.
I hope your faith in LessWrong has been restored somewhat. If replies with well-researched specific examples relevant to the discussion got downvoted, there would be no point reading LW anymore.
(Also like, come on, bravery debates etc. Ah, I see you are kinda new here. The more you disagree on this website, the more karma you get… if you can keep it polite, smart, and supported by evidence, of course.)
I think this ship has sailed long ago, given that the website is explicitly and unashamedly atheist.
Politically, however, the typical criticism from outside has always been that we tolerate too many opinions.
I’d describe this “good criticism gets upvoted, good ingroup-rah-rah gets upvoted, bad criticism gets downvoted, bad ingroup-rah-rah often gets weak upvoted.” Which I don’t like but am not sure what to do about it.
Mediocre criticism can get plenty of upvotes as long as it’s a culture fit.
If the author does a good job of pitching it to Less Wrongers, then the critical post can activate readers’ it’s virtuous to be open-minded mindset and turn their critical faculties towards the thing that the post is criticizing and away from the post itself. So instead of evaluating the post according to their ordinary standards of epistemics and quality, they instead try to find anything in it that seems good / insightful / overly neglected / provoking of new useful thoughts / on a promising track.
It’s not perfect, but compared to most of the internet, even most of the smarter parts of the internet, we are trying, and the difference is visible. Sometimes bad things get upvoted, but at least a well-written criticism supported by references gets upvoted, too.
Obviously (given the word “bipartisan” in the title), the goal here is not to defeat Republicans at all costs and start a glorious thousand-years era of wokeness. Which already makes it different from a typical anti-Trump debate. This is not about tribes, it is about destruction of the existing political order by one wannabe dictator, whose actions are atypical even for his own political party.
In this context, naming the bad actions of the other side is good—you won’t get bipartisan support against “bad things that Republicans do”. If this is something that every Republican would say when asked to support the resistance, we better be prepared for that in advance. Admit that in the past mistakes were made by both sides, but now things are getting completely out of control, so we need to agree on some common foundation of how we want thing to function. That includes calling out the previous defections against this common foundation, on both sides.