zlacker

>>andren+(OP)
This is a "culture war" topic, let's prepare for the shitshow in the comments.

I'd like to offer some advice to make things go a bit more smoothly. There's a widespread view that all beliefs are political, you can't be apolitical, and anyone arguing for a belief opposing yours must be an enemy. To me, that view is pretty much a type error. Beliefs are value-neutral. Only arguments for or against beliefs can be political or not.

More specifically, some arguments are rational (based on evidence) while other arguments are political (based on who benefits and who loses). You can be a very civil person, but still reach for political arguments when defending your beliefs, and thus cause net harm. Or you can be a rude person, but drawn to arguing based on evidence, and thus cause net benefit. It's up to you.

Now go forth and make a flamewar :-)

>>cousin+R2
It's the is-ought problem really. We can take a position on what is but very often pop off to talk about what ought to be. Further because people have differing levels of knowledge, understanding and acceptance of evidence of varying degrees of accuracy the rational positions on what is can be quite wide. Politics to me is not the opposite of rationality but where we take our is and extrapolate. As long as this extrapolation is reasonable to the evidence presented this is still rational since it's relative to the understanding of that individual. So I'm not sure that separating arguments into rational and political is that helpful except in dismissing others points of view.

For example there is plentiful evidence that women are less represented in certain STEM fields. But is that because they are ill-suited to them or the fields themselves are ill-suited to women. Do we accept this lack of representation as an inevitable consequence? It is this way and it ought to be so. Or do we broaden the possibilities and consider what these fields might be like and may accomplish otherwise if they were more female friendly.

I'd take a wild stab in the dark that prior political world view is probably a greater predictor than most for which of those options seems the more appealing.