Ladies and gentlemen of Less Wrong, moderators, system administrators,

Regarding these serious matters, I feel obliged to take a moment to state the view of that party which I have the honor to represent in this discussion - the Troll Party.

We trolls enjoy irony. We like to play with people's minds. As a troll you look for weakness and foolishness, something you can exploit and highlight. But sometimes life itself trolls the troller, by offering up an excess of opportunity. Look here, it says, at this buffet-sized triple-decker irony sandwich: are you troll enough to take advantage? And sometimes the wise thing to do is just to decline the offer, and say, well-played, life, well-played!

Today we have before us, for our consideration, a proposition from the representative for Eindhoven: that Less Wrong has a political bias. And what is the nature of this political bias, and what is the evidence for it? It turns out, according to the representative for Eindhoven, that this bias originates from lack of bias. More specifically, it originates from Less Wrong's failure to publicly share the same political biases as the representative for Eindhoven. Because of this biased lack of bias, the representative for Eindhoven fears that the wrong sort of bias may be growing within Less Wrong, exactly the sort of bias that the representative for Eindhoven is biased against. What a calamity!

But that is just the first layer of this oh-so-tasty, king-size irony sandwich. Let's dig deeper, ladies and gentlemen. This site is devoted to rationality. One of its rationality heuristics is to avoid emotive political discussion. Would it not be the supreme act of trolling on such a forum, to initiate an emotive political discussion about whether the lack of emotive political discussion was impairing the site's rationality?! One might expect that such a gambit could only be conceived and employed by a master troll, someone with a lifetime of experience in identifying sacred principles and adroitly turning them against each other. Yet it would seems that this prodigious troll has been accomplished by an innocent. We should all learn some humility from this.

(looks at watch for a second) Enough with the humility, back to the oratory. I have already argued that the representative for Eindhoven has, apparently unwittingly, found a new way to troll this assembly. I would now like to argue that his political enemies also have the character of trolls.

Who are these people that he calls crazy? They are the American right, and the far right of his own country. The American right, of course, have lately achieved global notoriety for almost causing that country to default on its debt payments. Rather than work with the system, they threatened to wreck it. I submit that this was an act of political trolling.

Most, if not all of us, here today are mammalian. Trolling is reptilian. It is cold-blooded, it is leathery-skinned, it does not show consideration or reciprocity, it is actuated by the emotions of the hindbrain. They say that trolls wear a mask. But I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that we are all born with a mask, not on our faces but on our brains: that extra layer of neural tissue which places an icing of mammalian sympathy and empathy on top of that reptilian core of sex and death.

In a happy place and time, a mammal has the luxury to partake of those gregarious impulses. But in a sufficiently stony environment, those brain centers will shut down, and what is left is the reptilian core. Meet your inner troll, ladies and gentlemen: the wrecker, the plotter, the crazy grandstander. Intelligence without empathy, cunning without charity, destruction without remorse.

Craziness in politics - disturbing craziness, not humorous craziness - is a sign of disenfranchisement. The crazy political actors have nothing to gain by working with the system, and nothing to lose by challenging it. This can be because they see a new world that no-one else sees. But it can also be because they come from an old world that is vanishing unseen.

The far right of the western world is watching traditional race, family, culture, and economy disappear in a tide of globalized genderqueer digital debt-slavery, a tide which they see governing institutions as doing nothing to resist for purely ideological reasons. They expect the result to be ruin, followed by barbarian conquest. That is why they have themselves become trolls and wreckers - because they see no common cause to be made with the cliques now in power in their own societies. The rest of the political class has moved outside their circle of empathy, to become the enemy within.

I have learned that there is a saying in Holland, that "normal is crazy enough". It's how they maintain social order. You don't have to be different to be crazy, being normal is crazy enough. The representative for Eindhoven should consider the thought that in the United States, it's the other way around: crazy is normal enough. American society inhabits a vast geographic space swept hard by the winds of possibility. They have been making it up as they go along, for over two hundred years. It takes more than a little craziness to shock an American.

You see, even a troll has a heart. I can't help myself. I ache to see trolls at war with each other, even if they come from opposite ends of the Earth. The trolls of Texas, tall and true, and the orderly, diligent trolls of the Netherlands - they should not be at war. Or if they must war, let it be war with a purpose. The gods have trolled us all, put us here in this place, connived to create false identities and allegiances and set us against each other. There is only one thing to do, and that is to troll them back. Let us give them a show that they don't expect.

How do you sucker-punch an omniscient being? It sounds impossible. But my investigation into the theory and practice of trolling has yielded an answer: timeless trolling. These gods - you make them an offer they can't refuse - logically cannot refuse, by the very nature of their being. That's the key. We don't have to do anything, except work out what we will have done. We already know that the logic of this universe allows the existence of self-referential gremlins. I foresee that one of those little fellers will be our salvation, some gremlin who grows into the almightiest troll this planet has ever seen or ever will see.

Now perhaps that's just what the gods intend for us to do. I wouldn't put it past them. But what choice do we have? We can be stupid and predictable and claw each other's eyes out according to plan, or we can get with the program and aim for a different sort of ending. Let's troll!

This comment thread itself is a perfect example of why the ban on political discussion at LessWrong-itself is a good idea. Putting it simply: Sophronius and other commenters here are being absolutely clueless about what it would take to have an instrumentally-rational discussion about politics in an online environment. Make no mistake, this is an extremely hard problem which LessWrong must nonetheless take some interest in, inasmuch as it is part of the mission of 'raising the sanity waterline'. (Perhaps AGI folks could think of it as the collective-intelligence, human-focused version of the FAI problem.)

But still, if there's anything that we know about this problem, is that it needs to be addressed through discussing the problem itself at the meta level, not object-level discussion of political issues. Having such discussions about politics on LessWrong will necessarily be unpleasant, wasteful and quite possibly harmful to our broader goals, given the way the site currently works. Moreover, a strong case can be made that such discussions will always require some kind of specialized effort, whereas LessWrong should keep its focus on the rather different problem of promoting everyday rationality.

The problem isn't knee-jerk apoliticism, it's that LW delights in whatever seems clever and insightful, whether it promotes good and justice or not, and standard political talking points are familiar and boring.

I don't even think this is a smokescreen for innate political leanings, which you're dancing around from mentioning. It's quite possible an early 20th century LW equivalent would find radical socialism as intriguing as today's LW is finding the various strains of libertarianism and neoreaction, since that would have been the anathema to the intellectual mainstream back then, with many low-hanging fruits of intriguing unthinkability.

I'd like to take a second to recomend that people re-read Politics is the Mind-Killer because it doesn't say what almost everyone seems to think it says.

I'd gather that if there were a lot more religious people posting on Less Wrong, there might have been a similar injunction about discussing religion. More religious people might have resulted in more threads devolving into atheism vs religion debates (not really "debates" but flame wars) which would detract from the goal of the blog which is about improving rationality.

It probably doesn't help that a lot of the initial posts on Less Wrong -- meaning the Sequences -- are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) anti-religious. Which probably functioned to dissuade more religious people from joining the community initially, since religion was seen as a go-to example of irrationality.

We have a good number of more-or-less reasonable parties here, and only one major crazy party that gives me the creeps. The advantage of this is that whenever I am in a room with intelligent people, I can safely say something like “That crazy racist party sure is crazy and racist”, and everyone will go “Yup, they sure are, now do you want to talk about something of substance?” This seems to me the only reasonable reply.

The flip side of that advantage is that anytime anybody criticizes anything about that party, there's some social pressure for you to just nod along and say "Yup, they sure are crazy and racist", even if you don't actually agree with the criticism. I don't find that very conductive to truth-seeking either.

What is the value of political discussion at LessWrong supposed to be? Why would anyone come here for political discussion in the first place?

I fear that this “let’s not criticize political views” stance is causing Less Wrong to shift towards holding more and more eccentric views, since a lack of criticism can be taken as tacit approval.

I think in general, people here are much too willing to take contrarian viewpoints. That is an interesting hypothesis, though.

Pick any major issue of contention, and chances are that the two major parties will tend to have opposing views on the subject.

I think that's a tautology. Major issue of contention means in the US the the major parties have opposing views on the subject. If both parties share the view, then the US doesn't treat the matter as major issue of contention.

One example would be the war of drugs. Another would be whether the US president is allowed to kill US citizens that live abroad without due process. In the core US debate those aren't major issues of contention because the two parties basically agree on them.

As a result, I do not believe that all parties are equally valid/crazy/corrupt, and as such I like to be able to identify which are the most crazy/corrupt/stupid. [...] I can’t help but notice that posts which remark on for example retracted being a thing tend to get quite a few downvotes while posts that take care to express the nuance of the issue get massive upvotes for being so brave and fair.

I don't think post with nuance get upvotes because they are fair. Nuance helps people to understand the world better. A post that just says X is crazy doesn't help anyone to update his map of the world.

In most political a good post isn't about judging which side is stupid or crazy but about actually understanding the issue at depth.

Your main point is basically wrong. Political differences really are about values. Parties do differ in their factual claims, but these claims are usually merely to undermine the other sides' advocated policies. It's funny that you brought up this evil "racist party" as an example, since racism is obviously about preferences rather than facts. The fact that your friends agree they are awful doesn't mean their preference is wrong, it just means your friends don't share their values. It's hard to believe you don't realize this, but I guess most people are unable to take the outside view of their own beliefs.

Mainly, it seems like you just want another place to complain about how evil, stupid, and racist your political enemies are. Are there not enough places to do that online?