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Academian comments on Proposed New Features for Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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Comments (169)
I keep getting riled up and wanting to post insults that you're all a bunch of elitist pricks, but then I remember I'm the one who put on the dojo uniform and stepped onto the sparring mat, so I guess I should have expected that kick to the face.
I think it's part of the culture, and not something that's easily changed. You guys can be ruthless.
Please note that the above are my opinions and I do not wish to argue about them. The last time I did that, it ended badly. It's like getting kicked for saying someone kicked you... or maybe I'm more fragile than most.
LessWrong is not an elitist community. It simply aims to provide a certain kind of material to the only people who can benefit from it: those with a certain aptitude for analytic thought. Without at least one such community, the "art of human rationality" would go on relatively unrefined.
To anyone who says that makes it elitist, I would ask: should a helpful therapy that involves temporarily tricking people be considered elitist because it excludes people who are too analytical to be tricked?
I'm not sure what you or Rain mean by elitist. I'm inclined to think Rain is overreacting, but "elitist" in the bad sense is a matter of emotional tone. The major tool we have for judging emotional tone is our own emotions, and they're quite a bunch of rubber rulers.
It wouldn't surprise me if there's a little unhealthy smugness here that I can't see because I share it. It also wouldn't surprise me if people who have a bad reaction to LW are mostly playing out ideas about their own intelligence that they'd picked up long before they'd encountered LW.
Hmm, I'm curious, what do you mean by "playing out ideas", and what sorts?
I mean that they'd been told they were stupid-- too stupid to get respect from smart people and/or could only expect to be harassed for being stupid. And when I say "told", I mean active efforts to lower their status, not an abstract proposition.
If a person whose been treated that way accepts that they can't function well and/or will be treated badly, they're going to have a lot of background anger which can get foregrounded if they think about taking part in an intelligent community, even if it isn't actually hostile to them.