Political topics attract participants inclined to use the norms of mainstream political debate, risking a tipping point to lower quality discussion

when I read, "Shall we just tell the Greeks to go jump into the Aegean sea?" I thought "Iliad".

:-D Yep. That's a good thing.

I think this member is mostly in the business of marketing his blog and isn't interested in LW otherwise.

We should debate what needs to be debated, not what's easy to debate.

Dunno whether "We" means "someone in general" or "LWers" there. If the former, I agree.

If the latter, ehhhh, I'm doubtful. Some things need to be debated, but from a consequentialist perspective it doesn't automatically follow that we should be debating those things. Political debates on LW tend to be better than political debates elsewhere, but they might not be a net gain.

I'd say we should debate what's hard to debate.

IMO, LW provides a very interesting forum. Progressives and Libertarians actually talking, and moderately civilly. What I like is the window into different priors and different values. Really, that's what is going on in your head? Who knew? Not me.

is an issue separate from the ability to have rational discussions about politics.

Or the desire to have rational discussions about politics.

People in power get that way by using discussion to get power, not illuminate the truth.

AIUI, they host open threads where comments are allowed. Alternatively, they do take e-mails, and will consider posting these if sufficiently relevant and high-quality (by their standards). Slate Star Codex allows comments, but with no karma system to provide a "currency", they're not exactly helpful.

Homeostasis of social communities is a very interesting topic. Let me just point out that there are dangers on all sides -- you don't want to be at the mercy of every wandering band of barbarians, but you also don't want to become an inbred group locked up high in an ivory tower.

I hadn't noticed a trend of political posts on LW, so hadn't been worried about this specific phenomenon.

"MAIN" "DISCUSSION" "QUARANTINE"

would be a good site layout.

We could easily use the LessWrong subreddit for that purpose, or create a LWPolitics subreddit.

The problem is that to contribute to that I would have to follow like 50 tumblrs and try to convince people to follow me as well

We don't have flame wars of the calling-each-other-names kind, because of norms that say that if you see a comment with the substring "you're an idiot" outside of quotation, you downvote it regardless of anything else. (Or at least this is my strategy. If the comment is otherwise brilliant, I retract the downvote instead of upvoting, but this doesn't happen.)

We do still have discussions about politics in which everyone says unproductive and/or stupid things. At the very least, all the stupidest comments that I've made on LW have been related to politics. And I'd go back and apologize for them if other people involved in the discussion weren't so obviously wrong.

And why do you think this is so?

Well, as for me, reading half the sequences change my attitude a lot by simply convicing me to dare to be rational, that it is not socially disapproved at least here. I would not call it norms, as the term "norms" I understand as "do this or else". And it is not the specific techniques in the sequences, but the attitudes. Not trying to be too clever, not showing off, not trying to use arguments as soldiers, not trying to score points, not being tribal, something I always liked but on e.g. Reddit there was quite a pressure to not do so.

So it is not that these things are norms but plain simply that they are allowed.

A good parallel is that throughout my life, I have seen a lot of tough-guy posturing in high school, in playgrounds, bars, locker rooms etc. And when I went to learn some boxing then paradoxically, that was the place I felt it is the most approved to be weak or timid. Because the attitude is that we are all here to develop, and therefore being yet underdeveloped is OK. One way to look at is that most people out in life tend to see human characteristics as fixed: you are smart of dumb, tough or puny and you are just that, no change, no development. Or putting it different, it is more of a testing, exam-taking attitude, not learning attitude: i.e. on the test, the exam, you are supposed to prove you already have whatever virtue is valued there, it is too late to say I am working on it. But in the boxing gym where everybody is there to get tougher, there is no such testing attitude, you can be upfront about your weakness or timidity and as long as you are working on it you get respect, because the learning attitude kills the testing attitude, because in learning circumstances nobody considers such traits too innate. Similarly on LW, the rationality learning attitude kills the rationality testing attitude and thus the smarter-than-though posturing, points-scoring attitude gets killed by it, because showing off inborn IQ is less important than learning the optimal use of whatever amount of IQ there is. Thus, there is no shame in admitting ignorance or using wrong reasoning as long as one there is an effort to improve it.

I think this is why. And this has little to do with topics and little to do with enforced norms.

Yes, but Bayesian rules are about predictions e.g. would a policy what it is expected to do e.g. does raising the min wage lead to unemployment or not, and political philosophy is one meta-level higher than that e.g. is unemployment bad or not, or is it unjust or not. While it is perhaps possible and perhaps preferable to turn all questions of political philosophy into predictive models, changing some of them and some other questions simply dissolved (i.e. is X fair?) if they cannot be, that is not done yet, and that is precisely what could be done here. Because where else?

First of all, the there is the meta-level issue whether to engage the original version or the pop version, as the first is better but the second is far, far more influential. This is an unresolved dilemma (same logic: should an atheist debate with Ed Feser or with what religious folks actually believe?) and I'll just try to hover in between.

A theory of justice does not simply describe a nice to have world. It describes ethical norms that are strong enough to be warrant coercive enforcement. (I'm not even libertarian, just don't like pretending democratic coercion is somehow not one.)

Rawls is asking us to imagine e.g. what if we are born with a disability that requires really a lot of investment from society to make its members live an okay life, let's call the hypothetical Golden Wheelchair Ramps.

Depending on whether we look at it rigorously, in a more "pop" version Rawls is saying our pre-born self would want GWR built everywhere even when it means that if we are born able and rich we taxed through the nose to pay for it, or in a more rigorous version 1% change to be born with this illness would mean we want 1% of GWRs built.

Now, this all is all well if it is simply understood as the preferences of risk-averse people. After all we have a real, true veil of ignorance after birth: we could get poor, disabled etc. any time. It is easy to lose birth privileges, well, many of them at least. More risk-taking people will say I don't really want to pay for GWR, I am taking my gamble tha I will be born rich and able in which case I won't need them and I would rather keep that tax money. (This is a horribly selfish move, but Rawls set up the game so that it is only about fairness emerging out of rational selfishness and altruism is not required in this game so I am just following the rules.)

However, since it is a theory of justice, it means the preferences of risk-aversge people are made mandatory, turned into a social policy and enforced with coercion. And that is the issue.

Now, how could Rawls (or pop-Rawlsians) get away with that? By assuming that all reasonable people are risk-averse anyway. In other words, turning risk-aversity into a tacit norm. Instead of seeing it negatively as a vice, or neutrally as a preference, it is basically a virtue here. Now, we have a perfect name for turning timidity into a norm: it is called cowardice.

And I think my argument managed to demonstrate avoiding in politics mind-killing up to the last sentence when I used a connotationally loaded word (cowardice), but at this point I had to, as I casually remarked earlier I feel this way about it and now had to explain why. But the last sentence refers only to my feelings and not an integral part of the argument, for the argument , just stop reading at "risk aversion should not be made into a norm and coercively enforced calling it justice".

Again, it is not part of the argument, but an explanation of my feelings: when I try to improve one my vices or weaknesses, and I see others almost see them as norms, I feel disgust. For example, willful stupidity disgusts me - I think this feeling may be common around here. But as I am also trying to work on my own cowardice, being too accepting of it also disgusts me.

The problem is that Rawls asserts that everyone is maximally risk-averse.