Warrigal comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong

10 Post author: CronoDAS 16 February 2010 08:29AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (857)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: komponisto 16 February 2010 04:25:27PM 14 points [-]

Someone once told me that the reason they don't read Less Wrong is that the articles and the comments don't match...I have no idea what that person is talking about. Do you?

Yes.

Back in Overcoming Bias days, I constantly had the impression that the posts were of much higher quality than the comments. The way it typically worked, or so it seemed to me, was that Hanson or Yudkowsky (or occasionally another author) would write a beautifully clear post making a really nice point, and then the comments would be full of snarky, clacky, confused objections that a minute of thought really ought to have dispelled. There were obviously some wonderful exceptions to this, of course, but, by and large, that's how I remember feeling.

Curiously, though, I don't have this feeling with Less Wrong to anything like the same extent. I don't know whether this is because of the karma system, or just the fact that this feels more like a community environment (as opposed to the "Robin and Eliezer Show", as someone once dubbed OB), or what, but I think it has to be counted as a success story.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 February 2010 04:43:53PM 9 points [-]

Oh! Maybe they were looking at the posts that were transplanted from Overcoming Bias and thinking those were representative of Less Wrong as a whole.

Comment author: Kutta 17 February 2010 11:51:17AM *  3 points [-]

I think that the situation about the imported OB posts & comments should be somehow made clear to new readers. Several things there (no embedded replies, little karma spent, plenty of inactive users, different discusion tone) could be a source of confusion.