Spurlock comments on More art, less stink: Taking the PU out of PUA - Less Wrong

66 Post author: XFrequentist 10 September 2010 12:25AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 13 September 2010 04:08:51PM *  1 point [-]

I'm in support of this idea under the condition that all of its output not be freely accessible to the public. (Or at least, not easy to find, or most-easily found through certain channels that we choose.)

Comment author: Spurlock 13 September 2010 07:16:09PM 3 points [-]

Can you elaborate? Making this a closed, secret community throws a lot of red flags to me for "potentially evil". It seems like we'd only want to keep it secret if we had a specific agenda (e.g. brainwash and enslave the masses).

I can see why if we accidentally did develop a method to brainwash and enslave people, we wouldn't want it to get out, but that's not the goal and doesn't seem like a likely outcome. What's so wrong with an open-source program to help people become "Less Awkward"?

Comment author: cabalamat 15 September 2010 12:32:05PM 2 points [-]

What's so wrong with an open-source program to help people become "Less Awkward"?

Learning new stuff often involves making mistakes until one gets it right. I imagine that if this community was created, many posts would be of the form "I did X recently and it went wrong; what could I have done better?"

Making mistakes in social situations is something that many find embarrassing, so they might want any such field reports not to become public knowledge. Hence, confidentiality may be necessary for people to talk openly.

Comment author: XFrequentist 24 September 2010 07:52:41PM *  0 points [-]

Anonymous != Closed

From a few other comments, I think Phil is more worried about:

  1. what such an effort signals about members' and affiliated groups' intentions, or

  2. keeping any high-value information that results in the hands of the good guys.

Could be mistaken, of course.