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Perplexed comments on Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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Comments (369)
IMO, the quality of comments on Overcoming Bias has diminished significantly since Less Wrong started up. This was true almost from the beginning, but the situation has really spiraled out of control more recently.
I gave up reading the comments regularly last year, but once a week or so, I peek at the comments and they are atrociously bad (and almost uniformly negative). The great majority seem unwilling to even engage with Robin Hanson's arguments and instead rely on shaming techniques.
So what gives? Why is the comment quality so much higher on LW than on OB? My first thought is karma, but OB didn't have karma when Eliezer Yudkowsky was posting, and the comments were pretty good back then. My best guess is that the good commenters were mostly Yudkowsky fans, and they left when EY left.
However, I don't know if anyone else shares my impression about OB commenter quality, so I may be completely misguided here.
I don't follow OB, but your comment sent me over there to look around. What I saw was a lot of criticism from feminists regarding posts by Robin that had a strong anti-feminist odor to them. I also saw some posts on less controversial subjects that drew almost no comments at all. So the natural presumption is that those feminist commentors are not regulars, but rather were attracted to OB when a post relevant to their core interests got syndicated somewhere. If that is what you are talking about then ...
Well, sure, a registration system might have repelled some of the commentors. If Robin really wants to insulate himself from feedback in this way, it might work. But I rather doubt that he is the kind of person to exclaim "OMG, we have wymin commenting here! Who let them in?". I hope his regulars aren't either.
Some comments on topics like this are emotive. Admittedly, you can't really engage with them. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't at least read them, count them, and try to learn something from their sheer existence, if not from their logic.
That isn't what I was talking about. I was talking about a general impression I've gotten over the last year. Robin's recent posts have received an Instalanche, so they're hardly representative.