"Politics is the mind-killer" is the mind-killer

I think the politics taboo is one of the best things about Less Wrong.

Yes, it's also a frustrating thing, because politics is important and full of relevant examples about rationality. But if you think you have an insightful, rational point to say about politics that will not degenerate into a sprawling discussion with negative utility... you are probably wrong.

I like the idea of starting a Politics Open Thread if it means I won't see any more political comments elsewhere on LW. Also it would work as a nice experiment to convince libertines like you that encouraging political discussion isn't a good idea, or convince curmudgeons like me that it is.

Data point: during the Melbourne LessWrong meetups, discussion of politics proved (a large fraction would say significant) net negative.

For what it's worth, I read Politics is the Mind-Killer as almost the opposite of your interpretation: that politics is a mind-killer, so why would you want to drag that awful mess into examples that could otherwise be clean. ie, avoid politics at significant cost, and this includes in otherwise sterile examples.

To some extent I wonder why we'd need to avoid politically-charged examples if we were capable of actually talking about politics; I feel like if that was the case it would be Politics is the Comment-Thread-Exploder, and we'd only avoid it because a throwaway example would case a huge, well-reasoned, rational but off-topic discussion.

I downvoted those comments because they sucked. They were wrong in systematic ways indicative of a killed mind.

People who err on the side of shutting down discussion and debate are commonly known as authoritarian in nature. I don't think that's a good thing. I would expect lesswrong to err more on the side of preservation of information, and free speech absolutism, designed for ease of reading and information preservation.

Just look at that snippet. The first sentence is awkwardly worded such that I can't tell whether he's committing the bandwagon fallacy, the fallacy of appeal to nature and arguing by definition, or the bandwagon fallacy and the fundamental attribution error. The second sentence is a crude rhetorical appeal. The third sentence wraps the usual total failure to understand that policy debates should not appear one-sided within cringe-worthy phrases pretending the position advocated is nuanced and pragmatic.

I don't have a policy of downvoting political pieces. I have policy of downvoting crap, and downvoting political comments is just what tends to happen.

I think it would be interesting if we had a politics thread where we held off on proposing solutions and spoke only in facts/questions. I'm not sure it's sustainable.

I'm curious what you mean by "well-meaning troll". The way I use the word, a "troll" is someone who posts for the enjoyment of disrupting discussions, pissing people off, or wasting people's time and making them look foolish. As such, "well-meaning troll" is an oxymoron.

The no-politics norm isn't just on LW; it's widespread. But these norms are a defensive adaptation, and I don't think they can be dropped safely.

Instead, I think we should have a designated politics day, on which all no-discussing-politics taboos are lifted in all contexts, and people who normally avoid politics are encouraged to post position papers. I think this would produce most of the benefits of talking about politics, while limiting the damage.

Several people have agreed with the idea of a politics thread and jumped to discuss implementation details, while others have expressed opposition, with both stances receiving upvotes. I think we need a poll. Response comments to this one include for, against, and karma balance.

'Politics' is a massive category, and has a disproportionate share of the important issues (relative to, say, randomly selected academic topics). In the long run (assuming there will be a long run), reinforcing the intellectual norm that politics is low-status and impossible to productively discuss is surely a bad thing if we think that it's at all important to get political questions right. It will function to make politics increasingly intellectually impoverished and divisive, as we keep seeing more and more of the calmest and sanest thinkers avert their eyes from politics and from political theory.

Because politics is so dangerous to talk about, especially high-level rationalists should be encouraged to practice their craft on it sometimes, to improve the state of the discourse, contribute important new ideas to it, and further hone their own knowledge and anti-mindkill skills.

That said, I agree that at this moment the risks of a politics open thread on LW probably outweigh the benefits. I would suggest instead an off-site politics discussion forum maintained by passionately dispassionate LWers, intended for discussants and posts with LW-like quality levels and topics. (If there already is such a thing, do let me know!) Since it would be off-site, there would be less risk of bleed-over, particularly since we'd have flexibility to implement extreme measures like:

• there are no public usernames, and users are discouraged from giving identifying information in their posts. So posters will not be easily identified with specific LWers, and the forum itself won't tend to coalesce around clearly defined personalities, making tribes relatively amorphous and individual posts difficult to ad hominem.
• there are private user accounts, i.e., the forum won't be open to unregistered users. This makes it possible to implement a karma system, and to strongly restrict the posting privileges of new visitors until they've repeatedly proved their lack of mindkill.
• to make it possible (though not too easy) to prove that you're the same person as a previous poster, we can introduce a special tag that, e.g., makes you able to type #4F33301 in red iff you are the user who made post 4F33301. So in special circumstances identity can be maintained without risk of impersonation. You can also refer back to 4F33301 in black if you want to clarify which post you're responding to.
• but instead of serial numbers like 4F33301, let's use random dictionary words like 'vial' or 'fittingly' to mark individual posts, because that would be way cuter and easier to remember.
• in fact, optimize for cuteness, quirkiness, and friendliness in general, as much as is possible while maintaining anonymity. The friendlier and funnier the site looks and feels, the more light-hearted and collaborative the posts will be. professionalism and silly benign emoticons are totally compatible.
• to make the karma system more useful, we can introduce community guidelines to the effect that you should upvote for good methods, more so than for Correct Beliefs. (To encourage this we can use framing like 'Useful? Not Useful?' as opposed to 'Vote Up? Vote Down?' or 'Like? Dislike?'.)
• karma will determine how visible your post is, but the actual karma number of the post itself won't be visible to anyone. So you'll get a general sense that you're doing a good job if you see your posts rising to prominence (or, perhaps, a private aggregate per-user karma number increase), but there won't be as much of a temptation to fixate on points as there is on LW.
• the politics forum will rely largely on top-down moderation, probably even more so than on karma. Moreover, getting your post readily visible on the site will be a mark of privilege and of exceptional poster quality, not the norm. Mindkill posts will be deleted without mercy or hesitation, and borderline/mediocre posts will be more readily hidden on the site than they are on LW. (Possibly all posts will require moderator approval, or moderators will have an easy shortcut to hiding the posts, e.g., giving massive downvotes.)
• users will be strongly encouraged to routinely report all site abuses, and will be strongly and swiftly punished for feeding trolls even in cursory ways. (Part of becoming a user with full site privileges might even include a trial run of proving you will actively report problem posts without replying to them.)
• users who don't use the karma system in a way that overall improves the site will have their voting ability taken away and all their votes annulled. So the ability to downvote or upvote itself might become a privilege rather than a base-level expectation for users. If the user base is amazing enough, high-level poster privileges might smoothly transition into moderator-style privileges.

What do you think?

I only have two kinds of political discussions now:

1. Pure trolling for emotional catharsis
2. Finding a way to evade the political part of the issue (in other words, if you're concerned about making medical care cheaper, can I think of a way to help you achieve your goal that doesn't require anyone to vote a particular way?)

The second is, I sincerely believe, the best way for us non-politicians to solve problems. The first is something I just kind of like doing. It's pure hate and I don't pretend it's anything else.

In general, I am extremely suspicious of claims that things are just fine the way they are. But this is one of those cases where I'm in that color.

A recent series of posts by a well-meaning troll

Doesn't this summarize lots of good reasons to keep imposing sharp costs on politics talk at Less Wrong? Looking at that guy's comment history makes me want to be even more aggressive at keeping it elsewhere.

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 would rather see politics at LW done in a way that playfully respects the complications that are obvious, and ends up doing something surprising and hopefully awesome. Let me see if I can develop this a bit...

Imagine starting with a pool of people who think their brains are turbo-charged and who "enjoy the possibility of discussing political topics in a 'rational' atmosphere (truth-searching, not us-vs-them, aware of biases and fallibility, etc.)". If they're really actually rational, you'd kind of expect them to be able to do things like Aumann update with people with similar capacities and inclinations but different conclusions on a given hot-button political subject. So the trick would be to find two people whose starting points on a political topic was radically different and have them be each other's chavutra, and discuss the subject with each other until they either agree on the relevant and substantive facts or agree to disagree.

Now, maybe this is just me, but it seems to me that having chavutra discussions in a public forum would introduce all kinds of signalling complications and potentially cause negative externalities if other people run into it without adequate background. To avoid both problems, it seems like it would be better to do this via the phone, or IM, or email. IM and email would be easier to log, but voice would probably be helpful for issues of tone and hashing out a common vocabulary fast.

I would expect this to be quite educational. Also I think it would be neat to read a joint write-up of how it went afterwards, where the reader finds out about the initial dramatically different opinions, and hears about the sort of higher level surprises came up in the process itself: how long it took, what was helpful, what was learned in general.

I'd personally prefer not to hear the details of the final conclusion other than the single yes/no bit about whether agreement was reached or not, because I would expect it would re-introduce signaling issues into the discussion itself, make future updates harder, and sort of implicitly suggest to the community and the wider world that these two people's conclusion is "endorsed by all reasonable people in general". (Which suggests a second order thing to try: have two pairs of people update on the same subject and then compare each pair's agreements...)

It would be pretty awesome if LW had a thread every so often where people broadcasted interest in finding an "aumann chavutra" for specific topics, including political topics. This might help with people specific "dialogue cravings". It might eventually start clogging up the site itself (the way meetup posts clogged things up for a while) but that seems like it would be a good problem to have to solve :-)

It might be that my current opinion is skewed by the present political situation in my country (Italy). I haven't enough knowlegde of foreign internal politics to judge if the italian situation is typical or not, brief conversations with foreign people on the subject suggest it's worse than in the average developed countries, but not that much. To the point.

There's one main problem of talking about politics: that it doesn't work like it should work, and there's little way to collect enough information to produce a good model of the reality. In practice: politicians, on average, don't try to do what they think to be the best interest of the country. They try to mantain the power and possibly to gain more advantages* from it. They have to pay debts to whoever supported them: the voters base, the powerful industrial groups, the trade unions, the banks and very likely the mafia. Sometimes these webs of interests are in plain sight, but very often they're not. Discussing of politics is therefore very often frustrating at best, since you have to work with partial (and very often wrong) info.

*E.G. the last year the government didn't fell mostly because more than 50% of the congressmen wanted to reach the pension threshold, and therefore need to sit in the parliament for another six months ( Link - in Italian unfortunately )

I don't see what the win from more discussion of politics is. Your vote doesn't count. Get over it. We have higher return things to attend to.

For what it's worth, I think that the realm of politics could be a great way to make discussions that need to be driven by truth-seeking and not tribal loyalties, give good opportunities to watch and guard against balance, and provides an opportunity to carefully calibrate confidence. I can see all the reasons why people (including me) couldn't handle it because we're not ideally rational, but if there was any discussion that gave LessWrong the ability to walk the talk and raise the sanity waterline, that discussion would be politics.

I would like there to be a politics open thread. I don't know how it would be for the health of the forum in general, but I think I would enjoy reading it.

This is not likely to be implemented easily here. When I looked at the poll it was around 20 for and 20 against having a politics open thread.

What could be done easily is start a subreddit lesswrongpoliticsbeta and if there did happen to be a great discussion on some topic ongoing there then put a pointer to it in the discussion sections here.