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komponisto comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011) - Less Wrong
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My impression is that Hacker News is above average, but still a noticeable notch below LW. Same goes for sites like the Richard Dawkins and JREF forums (perhaps two notches in those cases), and the comments sections of blogs of various academics (such as Overcoming Bias).
Skeptical sites are good, but not great, because being a good skeptic is different from being a good rational thinker. You can probably get by as a skeptic knowing only "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and the basics of the scientific method.
I agree with this, and in particular, although there are generally smart people on Hacker News, there are a ton of people who are interested in talking about business and startups 24/7, a topic I find extremely boring.
I'm a big fan of MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com/). The commenters there are charming and often pretty smart, but the spirit of discussion is usually somewhat less serious.
The key thing here separating Hacker News from LW is the "variety of topics". While HN is officially centered around startup culture (which like cata, I have no particular interest in), the community is happy to link to and discuss just about anything of intellectual interest. Today there's a link about punctuation marks for indicating irony.
The level of discourse might not be quite up to LW, but the subject matter is a lot more inclusive.
I find it strange that you would say that. (And I've read a lot of Hacker News.)
Given an arbitrary aspect of reality (e.g., an aspect of human life or of the world around us) I think you are just as likely to be able to start a discussion of it here as on Hacker News if you can meet LW's higher standard for rationality.
In other words, I think Hacker News is simply more tolerant of worthless ways of discussing topics, not tolerant of more topics.
(Of course, Hacker News is more worthwhile than most places on the web.)