Similary, ‘Politics is the Mind-Killer’ might be the rationalist idea that has aged worst—especially for its influences on EA.
What influence are you thinking about? The position argued in the essay seems pretty measured.
Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it’s a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational. [...]
I’m not saying that I think we should be apolitical, or even that we should adopt Wikipedia’s ideal of the Neutral Point of View. But try to resist getting in those good, solid digs if you can possibly avoid it. If your topic legitimately relates to attempts to ban evolution in school curricula, then go ahead and talk about it—but don’t blame it explicitly on the whole Republican Party; some of your readers may be Republicans, and they may feel that the problem is a few rogues, not the entire party.
I’m relying on my social experience and intuition here, so I don’t expect I’ve got it 100% right, and others may indeed have different interpretations of the community’s history with engaging with politics.
But concern about people over-extrapolating from Eliezer’s initial post (many such cases) and treating it more of a norm to ignore politics full-stop seems to have been an established concern many years ago (related discussion here). I think that there’s probably an interaction effect with the ‘latent libertarianism’ in early LessWrong/Rationalist space as well.
What influence are you thinking about? The position argued in the essay seems pretty measured.
I’m relying on my social experience and intuition here, so I don’t expect I’ve got it 100% right, and others may indeed have different interpretations of the community’s history with engaging with politics.
But concern about people over-extrapolating from Eliezer’s initial post (many such cases) and treating it more of a norm to ignore politics full-stop seems to have been an established concern many years ago (related discussion here). I think that there’s probably an interaction effect with the ‘latent libertarianism’ in early LessWrong/Rationalist space as well.