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SilasBarta comments on Less Wrong Should Confront Wrongness Wherever it Appears - Less Wrong
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Do you think LWers should adopt a general policy of avoiding criticisms of expert opinion, even if well-researched (e.g. most of what Robin Hanson does)?
I don't think we could (or should); many of the common opinions here are in opposition to widespread expert opinion. (e.g. the Copenhagen Interpretation still seems to be dominant among physicists; most scientific research uses frequentist statistics; most cryogenicists/cryobiologists reject cryonics (in public at least)...)
Certainly not!
However, for topics on which I myself am not informed enough to judge experts, I prefer criticism of non-expert opinion (i.e. "common misconceptions"), or explanation of expert opinion.
For example, in economics, interested in information on ways uninformed people (voters, journalists, some stockholders) are commonly mistaken, or explanation of various schools of economics and their points of agreement and disagrement. Which is what I meant in my answer James_Miller.
Arguments about why school of economics X is wrong are also possibly interesting, but I won't gain as much from them until I'm more knowledgeable about economics. So I'm not as interested in seeing a bunch of those on LessWrong.
Understood, but I'm trying to find the distinction (if it exists) between your personal preferences vs. what you think is appropriate for LW in general.
(Some folks here have a hard time with the difference, as we've seen in the past. You probably don't, but I want to make sure we're on the same page anyway.)