Has "politics is the mind-killer" been a mind-killer?

Until now no one has managed to make political discussion healthy. There's certainly room for experiment, e.g. I'd like to see a space for political discussion with a norm like "please stick to easily checkable claims". But norms like "please speak in good faith" or "please try to be rational in a vague general way" have been already tried and found not to work.

Policy decisions are important, granted. That doesn't mean that conversations about policy by people who are (generally) relatively ignorant and who don't make decisions or have much influence over the people who make decisions are important. Insofar as they are important, it is when they are converted into activism, which does have the problem of prioritizing your side winning over truth or rationality related goals.

Politics, that is, the actual process of running government, making laws and regulations, etc, that is important. Talking about politics as a spectator doesn't seem very important.

Everything in this post seems correct. The original post wasn't even that wrong (your changes are all good corrections), but it seems like many people took from it a shallow, slogan-like interpretation of "politics in the mind-killer", taking it to mean that rationally thinking about or discussing politics isn't even worth trying.

See also: Politics is hard mode [LW · GW], for previous discussion.

I agree with your disclaimers that not all people go crazy when they start talking politics, and not always the predicted bad things happen. Problem is, I already see how most people would react to a text saying that sometimes, some people go crazy when talking politics: "Meh, 'some people', that definitely doesn't apply to me. Now let me start screaming about why unconditionally supporting my faction is the most important thing ever, and why everyone who doesn't join us is inherently evil and deserves to die painfully." Or just keep inserting their political beliefs in every other discussion endlessly, because "hey, my political beliefs are rational (unlike political beliefs of those idiots who disagree with me), and this is a website about rationality, therefore it is important for people here to discuss and accept my political beliefs. If they disagree with me, they fail at rationality forever."

We tried to debate politics here; it usually failed. Apparently, believing in one's own rationality is not enough.

(There is also another way how political topics can destroy rational debate: they attract people who don't really care about the main topic of this website, but only came here to fight for a specific political belief.)

From my perspective, the main problem of "rationality vs politics" is that in a political fight, being transparent about your beliefs is usually not a winning strategy. (Saying "I am 80% sure I am right" is not going to bring masses to your side. Neither is replying to slogans and tweets by peer-reviewed articles full of numbers.) If you had a completely honest debate about politics, it would have to be done in private, because the participants would have to write things that could ruin their political careers if quoted publicly. (Imagine things like: "Yeah, I know that this specific important person in our party is a criminal, or that this specific popular argument is actually a lie, but I still support them because the future where they prevail seems like a lesser evil compared to the alternatives, for the following reasons: ...") So you get the multiplayer Prisoners' Dilemma with high motivation to defect, because breaking the rules of the game in favor of doing the right thing (which is how acting on a strong political belief feels from inside) seems like the right thing to do.

You write:

The truth of the mat­ter is, that policy de­ci­sions can of­ten have life-and-death con­se­quences.

But also:

ONE WAY OF THINKING ABOUT poli­tics is AS IF IT IS an ex­ten­sion of war by other means. Ar­gu­ments CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS sol­diers.

This seems like a contradiction. As you allude to, the fundamental question of politics is whose desires should and can legitimately be overridden by society--up to and including their desire not to be killed. With stakes so high, how can you justify placing good faith debate above using whatever tactics are necessary to avoid losing? It seems to me that if arguments aren't soldiers, you aren't actually engaged in politics.

I feel like “Politics is the Mind-Killer” made two points that came out pretty clearly to me and, I’d assume, most other people.

1. It is very hard to discuss politics rationally.
2. Therefore, avoid political examples (or use historical ones) when discussing rationality.

For example, Eliezer would advocate against saying “Hey, those stupid [political party] people made a huge mistake in supporting [candidate] in the 20XX election. Let’s learn from their mistake,” unless you were quite confident people could discuss the rationality and not the politics.

I think a lot of the “might”s and “could”s were avoided mainly for emphasis. Unless you have a strong reason to believe that someone will be able to be rational about politics, you can very safely assume they won’t be. “You have to support every argument on one side,” for example, is basically saying that most people don’t understand the nuance in saying that you think an argument is flawed even if you agree with its conclusion. I very commonly see people male horribly incorrect arguments for positions I strongly support, but pointing these out as flawed is rarely looked upon nicely among people who lack rationality skills.

While the conclusions you drew from the post were obviously harmful, I feel like very few people interpreted it that way.

He says that "Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers". I'd update this to say that "ONE WAY OF THINKING ABOUT politics is AS IF IT IS an extension of war by other means. Arguments CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS soldiers". 

This is a good shift for you to have made and I'm glad you can make it. Now you can just do this mentally to everyone's writing (and speaking, for that matter) all the time.

But asking writers to do it themselves is crippling. The new sentence you propose is obviously technically more accurate but it's also clunky, anemic prose.

Someone ages ago (maybe Viliam_Bur?) said that people thought they were drawn to LW by the good ideas but they were equally if not more drawn to LW by the quality of Eliezer's writing, and a key quality of Eliezer's writing is that he knew how to be punchy when he needed to be.

"Arguments are soldiers" is, and was always, poetry, not a mathematical identity. The point was to shock you into a frame shift in how you look at arguments (away from e.g. an implicit frame of "arguments are neutral tools we use to search for truth"), not tell you a Platonic Truth that you Believe Forever. And punchy writing is key to provoking these kinds of frame shifts; clunky writing just doesn't actually get through to any part of you that matters.

There are some groups with which I enjoy discussing politics, and some which I believe it is effective to do so, as it leads to decisions I make about where to live, what donations to make, how to vote (though that's pretty small impact), who to publicly support, etc.

In all cases, they're relatively small groups, with enough face-to-face contact that I can estimate the levels of rationality and knowledge, and tailor the discussions to what I can learn, more than how I can convince them of something (note: many times there _is_ an adversarial tone to the truth-seeking. I think this works well in person, and very badly online).

My main resonance with those threads is that politics (at all levels, from family to office to town to nation to world) is baked into humanity, and cannot be ignored. And simultaneously, the topics can't be abstracted or generalized enough to actually discuss dispassionately in almost any group situation. Politics is prisoner's dilemma with participants (including myself) whose motives are unknown and inconsistent, known to be at best partially-rational. When I can play with a consistent group of identified participants, I can learn which mechanisms work for each. When I play simultaneously with a large group, which statistically will include some always-defect, I fall into the defect-for-defense pattern.

I do, in fact get mind-killed. Often by what I perceive as my correspondents' mind-killing, so internally it feels like I'm tit-for-tat, but it's not clear that there's enough bandwidth to ever get back to a good equilibrium.

So, please do put individual thought into it, and if you have the right groups of people discuss in those groups. But not here, and probably not anywhere online in large groups. For those places, just recognize that you're there (as are most participants) to win people to your side, not to learn.

Note: even with you making a point of it, it took me two reads to understand why my initial read of "unless all the discussants are already rational" was wrong.

I'm not saying this should be discussed on LessWrong or anywhere else.

You might want to lead with that, because there have been some arguments in the last few days that people should repeal the "Don't talk about politics" rule on a rationality-focused Facebook group, and I thought you were trying to argue for in favor of repealing those rules.

But I'm saying that the impact of this article and broader norm within the rationalsphere made me think in these terms more broadly. There's a part of me that wishes I'd never read it in the first place.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/

For some people "talk less about politics" is the right advice, and for other people "talk more about politics" might be the right advice. FWIW, in my experience, a lot of the people I see talking about politics should not be talking about politics (if their goal is to improve their rationality).

People do go funny in the head when discussing politics. People who would never advocate for a medical treatment because they know one person for whom that treatment was effective are often very fast to see it as a valid argument that a given political policy is good because they observed positive outcomes in a single country after implementing that policy.

I quite recently heard from a Bay Area expat that they consider both Eliezer and Scott to have been politically mindkilled in the last years. I don't think Eliezer ate that hat he promised to eat.

Thinking rationally in general is hard and it's even more hard when statements are linked to tribal loyality. It's worthwhile to keep in mind that it's quite easy to become mindkilled while discussing politics when one engages in discussing politics.

The term dog whistle seems very commonly misused. According to the core meaning of the term, most people can't recognize the dog whistles of groups to which they belong.

Wearing a MEGA hat isn't a dog whistle, wearing Thor Steinar might be. If I meet someone wearing Thor Steinar I likely won't notice and as a result there wouldn't be mind killing effects.

The idea that you should treat certain statements as dog whistles because they are frequently made by people with certain political views and those statements should be treated as if the person is arguing for someone else, is an idea that's mind-killing.

What is the chance that the article will be updated in light of these observations, or that a new, superior version will be written that will out-proliferate the old one

Why is that number so low, and what can we do to change it