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jajvirta comments on Open Thread: July 2009 - Less Wrong
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Comments (235)
I would suggest that most people here are rational enough in terms of epistemic rationality, but their instrumental rationality is lagging behind, if I may call it this way. Hence the need for self-improvement stuff.
Once you reach a certain level of epistemic rationality, you realize that what you want next is not more refined epistemic rationality (that would be sub-optimal), you'd rather have.. more winning.
I for one don't object to discussions of self-improvement per se, only insist that they meet the intellectual standards of LW.
That is precisely my problem with them: in my humble opinion, the discussions about self-improvement have not met the intellectual standards of the other discussions here. And since they have represented a significant fraction of all comments here, they have decreased the intellectual standards of the average comment enough to make me worry that the kind of participants I most want to interact with are leaving Less Wrong at a rate higher than the other participants are.
EDIT. It would ease my worries if they were easier to avoid: for example, it would ease my worries if there were fewer of them in the comment sections of posts with no obvious connection to self-improvement.
Personal Development for Smart People Forums
...doesn't strike me as overwhelmingly high-quality.
It looks cheesy, but I've heard quite a few people like it, and I've read some interesting posts on his blog.
I read the blog, which is good in parts, but I've never found the forums worth the time.
After seeing:
I'm gonna recant my previous post. Not worth your time (and when did dreaming and lucid dreaming become "paranormal"?).
Edit:
Sheesh, half of these forums are the same thing.
Association fallacy. Just because the forums contain sections abhorrent to you, doesn't mean other sections are just as bad. Also, 3 of 17 is hardly half.
Are you suggesting it does not paint something about the general reliability of the community? I think this is silly.
Sure it is, modulo hyperbole :-)
Yes. I'm saying that those forums are quite large, and people who post in one section are unlikely to post in other sections. We can rely on, say, people in tech section to know tech.
True; the largeness is a factor.
I hope LW has room for self-help/improvement as well as other topics.
I'd prefer that it stay focused on refining the art of human rationality.
And I'd like to know about separate quality place to discuss self-help/improvement, as the original poster suggests.
ISTM that instrumental rationality overlaps a great deal with self-help/improvement. We could avoid the latter only by restricting ourselves to discussing epistemic rationality.
I don't want the more practical or self-improvement posts to overwhelm the more academic or posts, but I don't think the balance is too far off yet.
It's a subset of it. But there are a lot of other self-help topics that don't belong here except (as for any topic that isn't rationality) when there's a specific rationality angle being discussed: diet, physical fitness, personal organisation (i.e. things like GTD and 43 folders), and so on.