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prase comments on Less Wrong Should Confront Wrongness Wherever it Appears - Less Wrong
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You are probably right, and I tend now to favour slower membership growth.
But another issue comes to mind: we should have some more objective methods to measure the s/n ratio whether or not membership increases, because any community are in danger of falling prey to mutual reassurances how great and exceptional they are.
There is the danger that LW will become a mutual-admiration society, but if it does, the worst effect will probably be that people like you and I will have to find other places for discussion.
If SIAI becomes a mutual-admiration society, that is more serious, but LWers who are not SIAI insiders will have little control over whether that happens. (And the insiders I have gotten to know certainly seem able enough to prevent the possibility.)
So the question becomes, Is the risk that LW will become a mutual-admiration society higher than the risk that "confronting wrongness wherever it appears" (jimrandomh's proposal in jimrandomh's words) will change LW in such a way that the voters and commentators who have made it what it is will stop voting or commentating?
I haven't meant it as a dilemma "mutual admiration society" vs. "indiscriminate battle against wrongness", that would hardly make sense. I am even not really afraid of becoming mutual admiration society or cult or something like.
I only intended to ask a question (more or less unrelated to the original discussion): how reliably do we know that the s/n ratio is really high? There is a lot of room for bias here, since "this is an exceptionally rational community" is what we like to hear, while people with different opinion aren't heard: why would they participate in a rationalist community, if they thought it weren't so much rational after all? Put in another way, any community which values rationality - independently on how do they define it and whether they really meet their needs - is likely to produce such self-assuring statements.
So when I hear about how LW is great, I am a little bit worried that my (and everybody else's) agreement may be biased. As always, a good thing would be to have either an independent judge, or a set of objective criteria and tests. That could also help to determine whether the LW standards are improving or deteriorating in time.