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I agree that it's unreasonable to argue against having a discussion for the sake of decorum. If the discussion needs to happen, it needs to happen, but I think you're ignoring the fact that many anti-gun control advocates think the current state of affairs is fine. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you think a conversation is important to have because you believe that such a conversation would reshape the world in a way that is more closely aligned with your preferred policies. Anti-gun control advocates don't want that.

This is exactly why a lot of people don't discuss politics at work. You first sentence also kind of assumes that the side that believes the world is on fire is correct. It would probably be beneficial to allow the discussion of politics at work if the side that believed the world was on fire was indeed always correct, but sometimes they aren't, and what then?

I personally would prefer, for example, if someone didn't try to convince me to do something to save my immortal soul, regardless of how ardently they believe that my immortal soul needs saving.

> You first sentence also kind of assumes that the side that believes the world is on fire is correct. It would probably be beneficial to allow the discussion of politics at work if the side that believed the world was on fire was indeed always correct, but sometimes they aren't, and what then?

I was trying to avoid wording the above with any bias one way or the other - presenting both sides in their self-promoted light... The problem is that I think it's unclear when the world is on-fire or not and when you feel that a discussion isn't world ending it might just be that your thoughts are trapped in a bubble and you're having difficulty empathizing with the reason why the other side thinks the world is on fire. Certainly the world isn't on fire in every conceivable way, but evaluating whether a problem warrants a discussion or not is already a potentially opinionated decision.

Yeah, I appreciate the lengths you went to to avoid bias! This is spot on.

> This is a divide we need to resolve.

The question is how much of that needs to be hammered out at work.

Part of the problem may be that we've tied the workplace so intimately into our lives that it's cramming out activities vital to the civilization's health, like participation in local civic, religious, or charitable organizations, where such topics are generally not only welcome but often the rasion d'etre.

Employees have a very understandable impulse to do something to influence social health for good, and if work becomes the only place where such an impulse can feel effectively fulfilled, it's no surprise that political discussion spills over irrespective of management dicta.

Rather than decreeing political discussion off-limits, maybe Google could consider something like reorienting and/or resurrecting 20% time to focus on allowing employees to effectively practice good citizenship, rather than using that time to generate new IP for Google to hoard.

Or a 30 hour work week, which should be a legal mandate at this point.

Fewer than 2,000 people died in American mass shootings over the past 10 years. https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/116056745085073408...

The problem is that mass shootings are effective terrorism — people freak out about them. But they're not a significant cause of death by any means.

Even that sounds like a lot, so it's important to compare to other causes of death in the same time period.

Just a random comparison:

200 per year for mass shootings.

3,536 per year for drowning not related to boats.

332 additional per year for drowning related to boats.

70,000+ per year from drugs (largely opioids).

https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/w...

A lot of people have real trouble contextualizing statistics and videos because they can't really conceive of how many people there are. This makes it really easy for motivated media activists to manipulate opinion by heavy reporting of particular incidents, while ignoring trends that are killing literally hundreds of times more people.

This reply annoys me.

Gun control? THAT's your example of the world being on fire?

If nothing is done about it 12k Americans a year will die, that isnt really going to have much of an effect in the long run for the vast majority of us. There are plenty of actual "world on fire" debates you could have used, including:

* Climate change

* Nuclear proliferation

* Antibiotic resistance

* Aquifer sustainability

* AGI

* Dystopian trends

* Dysgenic trends

Things that are on the actual "this has potential to kill or drastically reduce quality of life for billions of people" level (even if some are pretty far fetched in my view).

"World on fire" topics do exist, and for some reason they aren't the ones that result in toxicity.

This isn't the other side. The other side would be that because people don't express their political opinions effectively enough, people aren't motivated to enact political change in actually dire situations.

What's at question is the way people treat each other and approach these topics, not their actual positions (half of people think there's a huge problem while the other half don't believe there's a problem)--which is what you're discussing.

No one pro-gun is refusing a discussion: they’re refusing emotional manipulation, whereby you use dead children as totems for emotional impact, but fail to discuss the actual costs and facts.

As you’ve done here.

“I’m emotional about something that might happen to my child, look at these dead kids!” while refusing to address their point — guns used for self defense and civil freedom — isn’t having a discussion, and isn’t a way to reason about a complex trade off in society. It’s using dead children as a grotesque banner for your emotional manipulation.

Maybe if you want a discussion, try having one?