cupholder comments on Forager Anthropology - Less Wrong

11 Post author: WrongBot 28 July 2010 05:48AM

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Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 29 July 2010 07:18:26PM *  2 points [-]

Since you are essentially asking for feedback, WrongBot, I will chime in with my opinion: you are nowhere near able to use evolutionary arguments to arrive at correct conclusions about human behavior.

There is no shame in that since creating evolutionary arguments about human behavior is one of the human endeavors most demmanding of rationality skills, in particular the skill of staying free from motivated cognition.

This place (and OB before it and SL4 before OB) is very special in that deleted: a significant fraction :deleted some of the participants are rational enough to succeed at that task and similar tasks, and I would humbly point out to you and the people who have been voting you up and Michael Vassar down, that if the ratio of good argumentation and good conclusions to poor ones gets low enough for long enough the people you want to learn from will stop reading, and no one will be able to learn anything about advanced rationality here.

I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, "Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot."

I hope my being open with my perceptions has not caused you unnecessary pain.

Comment author: cupholder 30 July 2010 01:13:17AM 4 points [-]

I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, "Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot."

I think your houseguest might not have read a representative selection of LW posts; their assessment doesn't ring true for me. I haven't read WrongBot's top-level posts closely (nothing personal - the evolutionary psychology stuff just isn't that interesting to me), but I've skimmed through the resulting threads/comments on them as they've passed through Recent Comments, and they honestly don't look all that bad.

I can think of a few recent posts/discussion topics that I am fairly confident have lower quality than WrongBot's:

  • '(One reason) why capitalism is much maligned'
  • Daniel_Burfoot's quite rambling series of posts that uses 7000 words just to talk up data compression as an add-on to the scientific method
  • whpearson's bit of evolutionary psychology 'Summer vs Winter Strategies'
  • MBlume's link to 'Jinnetic Engineering' - the content is good, but it's not meaty enough for a top-level post IMO
  • the string of posts a while back dancing around the Sleeping Beauty puzzle and what it meant - there was a lot of good in them, and their comments, but the discussions got really flabby really fast
Comment author: whpearson 30 July 2010 11:17:26AM 1 point [-]

Mine was intentionally low quality. I don't have the patience for long essays, and thought it was an interesting hypothesis and worth sharing for that reason.