orthonormal comments on A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness - Less Wrong

82 Post author: Alicorn 05 January 2010 09:32PM

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Comment author: orthonormal 06 January 2010 02:27:45AM *  13 points [-]

In my experience, people who are particularly nice in debates and discussions (as opposed to mere conversations) are usually those whose opinions are either the bland dogmas that everyone accepts without thinking, or the ridiculous nonsense that only crackpots believe.

I strongly beg to differ. I haven't found niceness to be correlated with depth of thought; however, I have found that (ceteris paribus) I prefer reading exchanges between nicer people.

Comment author: Furcas 06 January 2010 02:47:55AM 6 points [-]

Aw, but here on Less Wrong we barely ever have to deal with idiots and crazies, so it's easy to be nice if you want to. Go to the richarddawkins.net or randi.org forums and look at who's being extra-nice.

Comment author: bogus 06 January 2010 03:35:01AM 8 points [-]

Is "idiots and crazies" really the best description of such users? It seems to me that these are mostly users who self-identify with some well-defined clusters of views, and that any 'idiocy' woud be well explained by their factional identity. This would be a political divide masquerading as simple disagreement: a difficult issue and well outside LW's scope.

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