I had been thinking about making the same suggestion. Some pros of a politics thread include:
Having a place to take the long subthreads on politically-charged topics that sometimes inevitably arise by topic drift on other posts, making LW a more pleasant experience for politics-allergic readers.
A place to test whether our rationalist skills are up to the task of discussing mind-killing topics in a non-mind-killing way.
Some would enjoy the possibility of discussing political topics in a “rational” atmosphere (truth-searching, not us-vs-them, aware of biases and fallibility, etc.) that other politics forums do not have.
Cons:
Mind-killing of a certain degree might (some may say, would) nevertheless occur. This is not so tragic if the thread remains a self-contained experiment and the rest of LW proceeds as usual. The danger is that there might be spillover. If you were in a heated argument in the politics thread, and then see an unrelated post on AI or game theory by your rival, would you be able to avoid the halo effect and not judge it negatively as the post of a commie/libertardian/racist/PC thought cop/whatever? Even worse, if the arguments in the politics thread happened to usually have the same participants taking the same sides in opposite political clusters, we would be in danger of a Robber’s Cave situation.
Some might be concerned that having extreme/contrarian political views openly expressed may bring bad reputation to LW, but without these views represented the discussion would be bland and uninteresting. Personally I don’t see why things would be necessarily worse with a politics thread than with already existing threads like this one. One could even argue that it would be good for appearances to have all the “extremism” concentrated in one or a few politics thread/s, and not scattered all over the site.
I think the experiment is worth trying, with rules like Tim’s clearly stated in the post, and ruthlessly enforced by downvoting offenders even if they share your “side”.
I had been thinking about making the same suggestion. Some pros of a politics thread include:
Having a place to take the long subthreads on politically-charged topics that sometimes inevitably arise by topic drift on other posts, making LW a more pleasant experience for politics-allergic readers.
A place to test whether our rationalist skills are up to the task of discussing mind-killing topics in a non-mind-killing way.
Some would enjoy the possibility of discussing political topics in a “rational” atmosphere (truth-searching, not us-vs-them, aware of biases and fallibility, etc.) that other politics forums do not have.
Cons:
Mind-killing of a certain degree might (some may say, would) nevertheless occur. This is not so tragic if the thread remains a self-contained experiment and the rest of LW proceeds as usual. The danger is that there might be spillover. If you were in a heated argument in the politics thread, and then see an unrelated post on AI or game theory by your rival, would you be able to avoid the halo effect and not judge it negatively as the post of a commie/libertardian/racist/PC thought cop/whatever? Even worse, if the arguments in the politics thread happened to usually have the same participants taking the same sides in opposite political clusters, we would be in danger of a Robber’s Cave situation.
Some might be concerned that having extreme/contrarian political views openly expressed may bring bad reputation to LW, but without these views represented the discussion would be bland and uninteresting. Personally I don’t see why things would be necessarily worse with a politics thread than with already existing threads like this one. One could even argue that it would be good for appearances to have all the “extremism” concentrated in one or a few politics thread/s, and not scattered all over the site.
I think the experiment is worth trying, with rules like Tim’s clearly stated in the post, and ruthlessly enforced by downvoting offenders even if they share your “side”.