A Category for Philosophy discussion?

[Adroit]

Continuing the discussion from On solving the world's problems:

@photm

I then wondered whether this is OK for you. After all, I wouldn’t be here to help funding FLO, but to talk about off-topic things. I felt this might be distracting and very rude behavior, similar to what trolls do. I concluded with the hope that there’s a way forward that both allows me to have these sorts of conversations, while at the same time being net positive for the project.

If we do decide to allow such discussion on the forum (I’m not against it), I suggest we just make a new forum category called “Philosophy (Personal)” or something (where it’s understood that no views expressed there represent the project). Better than a generic “Off-topic” category, I think snowdrift specifically inspires such discussions (philosophical) so there might as well be a place for it.

[wolftune]

Note that this or even “off-topic” categories could be made for Trust Level 2 or even 1 if we want to allow not-fully-public (avoid random trolls or extra noise) without being limited only to TL3.

[smichel17]

I don’t think we should do this yet.

I am not opposed to creating such a category, but to start I think it should be limited to TL3. While in principle I like the idea, and I agree that Snowdrift tends to inspire these sorts of conversations, tackling the problem of civil discourse is a massive increase in scope. Given our current resources, I think it distracts from our core mission.

Just because @Adroit and @photm are capable of having a nuanced discussion in text without much moderation, does not mean the internet at large is.^[1]

Given that #restricted:lodge has not seen much traffic so far (as expected, since not many people have TL3 so far), I am not sure there is value in creating a separate philosophy category…. yet!

I also think we ought to split the last few posts in On solving the world's problems, where the discussion takes a philosophical turn, into a new thread in #restricted:lodge.

As a compromise to keeping this type of discussion TL3-restricted, I think we should not hesitate to manually bump people to TL3, when appropriate. We can think of the default TL3 criteria as, “This is how much interaction we need to have with someone [on the forum exclusively] before we trust they can engage appropriately with off-topic and more-private conversations.” However, there’s other channels where we interact with people — matrix/irc, github, meetings… Discourse can’t know about those, but we can act^[2] on them.

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1. Particularly, remember that we do not have a very diverse set of ethics here. Even in areas where we do differ, like religion, Adroit mentioned having a religious background, and so is better able to understand the other side, without any discussion at all. ↩︎

2. I've gone ahead and granted @Adroit TL3. ↩︎

[Adroit]

That’s fair!

@smichel17

I also think we ought to split the last few posts in On solving the world’s problems

Oh, but we already split up that thread so much, and the conversation seems to have reached an end anyway

@smichel17

manually bump people to TL3, when appropriate

Don’t forget (if you care) - this probably circumvents the function whereby which TL3 status is revokable by default. Discourse is normally programmed to automatically un-earn TL3 when the requirements are no longer met.