I don't think I have ever seen you make a concrete constructive proposal about anything, as opposed to objecting to other people's.

Hmm. That sounds like a nice rule: anyone who spends all their posting efforts on objecting to other people's ideas without putting forth anything constructive of their own shall be banned, or at least downvoted into oblivion.

I didn't say excluded from the conversation. I said exposed to the bright, glaring sunlight of factual rigor.

Only an ill-posed problem can never be solved, in principle.

Have you considered that there may be a lot of endless hashing out, not because some people have a preference for it, but because the problems are genuinely difficult?

I've considered that view and found it wanting, personally. Not every problem can be solved right now with an empirical test or a formal model. However, most that can be solved right now, can be solved in such a way, and most that can't be solved in such a way right now, can't be solved at all right now. Adding more "hashing out of big questions" doesn't seem to actually help; it just results in someone eventually going meta and questioning whether philosophy is even meant to make progress towards truth and understand anyway.

Hi. I used to have an LW account and post sometimes, and when the site kinda died down I deleted the account. I'm posting back now.

We claim to have some of the sharpest thinkers in the world, but for some reason shun discussing politics. Too difficult, we're told. A mindkiller! This cost us Yvain/Scott who cited it as one of his reasons for starting slatestarcodex, which now dwarfs LW.

Please do not start discussing politics without enforcing a real-names policy and taking strong measures against groupthink, bullying, and most especially brigading from outside. The basic problem with discussing politics on the internet is that the normal link between a single human being and a single political voice is broken. You end up with a homogeneous "consensus" in the "community" that reflects whoever is willing to spend more effort on spam and disinformation. You wanted something like a particularly high-minded Parliament, you got 4chan.

I have strong opinions about politics and also desire to discuss the topic, which is indeed boiling to a crisis point, in a more rationalist way. However, I also moderate several subreddits, and whenever politics intersects with one of our subs, we have to start banning people every few hours to keep from being brigaded to death.

I advise allowing just enough politics to discuss the political issues tangent to other, more basic rationalist wheelhouses: allow talking about global warming in the context of civilization-scale risks, allow talking about science funding and state appropriation of scientific output in the context of AI risk and AI progress, allow talking about fiscal multipliers to state spending in the context of effective altruism.

Don't go beyond that. There are people who love to put an intellectual veneer over deeply bad ideas, and they raid basically any forum on the internet nowadays that talks politics, doesn't moderate a tight ship, and allows open registration.

And in general, the watchword for a rationality community ought to be that most of the time, contrarians are wrong, and in fact boring as well. Rationality should be distinguished from intellectual contrarianism -- this is a mistake we made last time, and suffered for.