A question about the rules

LW is the empty place with the empty boxes are the threads with politics in them.

Though driving isn't the best metaphor. LW is the moot court. Or boxing ring. Or dance floor. Takes two to tango.

We could segregate these things for those who don't feel their up to having a political discussion. Tag a thread with Politics. Don't want to talk politics, don't go into the thread.

But driving drunk is not exactly the same skill as driving sober, so that practicing drunk can be expected to improve your skills in driving drunk in ways that only driving sober would not.

I think we should change this, because a lack of fixed rules makes LW pretty hard to use and helps keep it dead.

Posting something to LW requires a nontrivial investment of time and energy into the crafting and editing of the article. High quality posts require much more effort than low quality posts. If the rules are not clear, or if there is not an effective and reliable process for appeal, then two things will happen:

(1) There will be fewer posts as more authors choose not to post on a topic if they think there is a chance of it being moderated. E.g. if there is some haphazard moderation of low-quality political posts, but without clraity or consistency, then you will end up seeing no high quality posts either as people who would be writing are unsure whether their time investment would be wasted.

(2) What posts do exist will be lower and lower quality as authors are not willing to invest significant time and energy into something they are uncertain will be allowed on the site.

If you have uncertainty about the rules, then you end up increasing the assessed probability that any potential topic might be moderated, which discounts the effective return for writing these posts, which decreases the quality of LW. If you want to make LW a better community, then clarify those rules.

If you still want to ban politics, whatever, your actions are law, but be transparent and say what you are doing. Don't just say "Politics is the Mind-Killer." Your rules have absolutely nothing to do with that essay. Have you even read it? I have never, not once, seen anyone cite that essay to attack a post that actually violated it.

No, if you are a moderator then do you job and actively review what you moderate so that you can provide effective feedback to those who are affected by your actions in order to best help the community grow. Overzealous moderation has negative effects which it is just as much the moderator's job to avoid.

You're clearly not interested in discussion of your condemnation of liberals, and certainly not rational discussion.

Look, if you had just said that my tone makes it unlikely that I'm interested in rational discussion for someone who doesn't know me, I would have conceded that point to you. But it's simply not true that I'm not interested in rational discussion and, crucially, anyone who has read my post can see that it's not true. Indeed, in the note at the end of the post, I say that on the blog where the original version of this post was published, I report a conversation about that post I had with a friend which led to some useful clarifications. I actually report the conversation verbatim and, if you go read it, you will see that it's not only civil and rational, but also fruitful. Now, you may think that, given the tone of the post, people are less likely to read that conversation and you're probably right about that. But it doesn't change the fact that it's not true that I'm clearly not interested in rational discussion and the evidence to the contrary is available to anyone who has read my post.

Also, while I agree with you that, by saying the kind of things you quote, I made it less likely that people will read my post,I want to make clear that it doesn't mean they are just false, gratuitous assertions. It's certainly true of some of them, so I'll grant you that, but I don't believe for a second it's true of all. For instance, when I say that Trump's victory led to hysterical reactions in academia, I don't see how any reasonable person who works in academia and understand the meaning of the word "hysterical" could deny it. Of course, we could even argue about this, but that's because as philosophers know, you can always give a seemingly reasonable argument for virtually every claim no matter how absurd. But this doesn't mean that you're being rational.

People who don't already agree with you won't be convinced because you obviously disdain them and are writing with obviously massive bias against them.

Again, I would have conceded a weaker point, but this is just false. I actually have argued for the claim I'm defending in my post with some of my liberal friends in a non-confrontational way and, not only did it fail to have any effect on them, but it was met with accusations that I was insensitive to the plight of minorities. (To be clear, I'm not suggesting that it justifies the tone I'm using in my post, I'm only saying that it's evidence against the strong claim you make.) Most of them are highly intelligent people with a PhD, yet when it came to this issue, they adopted standards of evidence that on any other issue they would have rejected as completely unacceptable. So while I would be happy to concede that, in some cases, the fact that I used abrasive language may have prevented me from convincing people whose mind I would otherwise have changed, but it doesn't mean that, in most cases, it's because I used that kind of language that I failed to convince people and, indeed, I think it's false. Some facts are causally overdetermined and I think it's one of them.

It's not even true that I didn't convince anyone who wasn't already convinced, since I know for a fact that some people were. This should not be surprising since, although there is a sense of "strength" according to which my tone make the argument in my post weaker (i. e. the probability that I will succeed in convincing people who have a look at it), there is another sense of "strength" (i. e. how well my evidence and my reasoning establish my conclusion from a purely logical/statistical point of view) according to which my tone is completely irrelevant to how strong my argument was. Intelligent people should be able to make abstraction of the tone to assess the merits of the argument independently of it, although I agree with you that intelligent people should also be able to avoid the kind of language that makes it less likely that others will read what they have written.

Colorful language is perfectly fine. It's refusing to reason and to support one's arguments with evidence that is frowned upon.

While I would agree that those kinds of accusations are used unfairly at times, I don't think it's unreasonable to assign Yudkowsky's statements a higher a priori chance of being true.