As a less wrong lurker this thread did a great job at putting into words the main reason I’ve been very hesitant to get more involved with the community.
I do think that anything politic is some of the hardest materiel to have any sort of discussion about while remaining rational and effective and not falling prey to our bias.
On the other hand from my experience I strongly agree that what is and isn’t political is highly contextual and variable for different people. I worry that the aggregate limits of what can and cannot be discussed as political are to a degree driven by the group dynamics itself and can lead to group think fail cases. This can lead to fragmentation where different groups with different biases in their group makeup will still settle on different limits for what is political and apolitical, and create barriers between any sort of integration between those cultures.
An issue that is highly political from one perspective but not from another might still get discussed at some great length if the majority don’t find that given topic political. This then creates a mine field that those in the minority that can be hard to address. Trying to address this problem in the first place often requires someone with a minority viewpoint trying to inform others that from their perspective something that was apolitical to the speaker was still political for others.
But then again this is a hard problem. I would argue that at the very least, the current approach of politics as a mind killer does have a lot of failure cases that can be harmful for the community, especially when it creates divides between a majority opinion on what is and isn’t political. Any progress the community can make to improve the methods we use to deal with this problem to help minimize the failure cases is a step in the right direction. I don’t see anyway this problem is one that can be solved with a greedy heuristic approach an optimal method. It’s a fundamentally social problem, and social cognition is far too complicated and chaotic to ever be fully reduced.
Looking at this topic more broadly than solely in terms of HPMOR and it’s reviews, I would argue that for many people their exposure to the concept of rationality is predominantly made up of half rationalists.
Rationality is hard. It gives us tools that allow us to update old preconceptions of the world. However in practice we will often fail in our rationality due to insufficient information or other cognitive limits while still identifying our actions as being superior due to rational principles. It is very off putting to see others claiming superiority yet still be full of flaws in reasoning due to bounded rationality. From your perspective you might clearly see a flaw in their reasoning, perhaps one you can’t communicate well, even if from their perspective they have applied rationality.
This creates cognitive dissonance for accepting the idea that rationalism leads to better reasoning.
EY wrote a bit about the dangerous of being half a rationalist within the body of this post if you want to continue this train of thought.