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Emile comments on Woo! - Less Wrong
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Comments (57)
Perhaps you have not realized how this blows up your whole site.
At present it is a neutral record of expert opinions. Who said what. On the record.
To label something as "woo" - or even the far more innocuous "persuasion pattern" - is not a neutral act. People disagree about what is woo or not woo. They disagree about whether persuasion patterns are being used. They disagree about what constitutes a logical fallacy, both in general and in the specific.
If someone claims that the Singularity is religious woo, do I get a chance to defend myself? How?
You have just taken a giant step from recording expert opinions to trying and provide a way for your audience to accuse and counteraccuse experts of being biased. This is not a trivial step. And allowing people to label things as "woo" does not seem like the best first step.
That's not the same "woo" as BenAlbahari is referring to - he's trying to impose a new term (with a different etymology) that seems to have some accidental overlap with "woo" as you seem to be using it here (which has more negative connotations). Which is a very very bad idea.
Someone claims the Singularity is a religious, theistic persuasion pattern that offers its believers a happy afterlife while others are left in the cold - to give an example of a typical and common accusation that people just make up, not based on any evidence, but because their brain completes the pattern for what they expect.
Do I get to defend myself? How?
Let's make this conversation non-hypothetical. Here's your expert page on TakeOnIt. I tagged a few of your quotes with some pitches:
http://www.takeonit.com/expert/693.aspx
I see. Well, I don't object to the labels that I see. But you're allowing anyone to edit the pitch list. What happens in case of an edit war?
You get a cacophony.
Seriously however, I see this as highly comparable to editing a controversial Wikipedia page, such as a page on George Bush or Climate Change. Ultimately the moderators get the last say, but you make the edit history transparent. I'm happy for anyone with enough rep points on Less Wrong to be a moderator on TakeOnIt. To be honest, at this point, my hunch is that any hypothetical answer I have to this question will be overshadowed by what I discover happens in practice.