Comment by card_zero

But reading all those old threads, I got three interpretations of "on topic":

1. Trivial intellectual trinkets,

2. Important topics that happen to overlap with intellectual interest,

3. Important topics that we somehow manage to have a thoughtful discussion about.

Is "off-topic" really about the standard of discussion and not about the topic?

There's a lot of mysterious influences in the dynamics between topic type, community culture, and standard of discussion. I mean to say that allowing thoughtful discussions of controversial topics is not a pipe dream, but it only happens occasionally and we're not really capable of sustained flight, so to speak. It seems like the interesting (worthy, important) adventures into inflammatory topics are parasitic on the comfortable trivial intellectual fluff, which keeps the forum-wide inflammation level down.