nhamann comments on Hi - I'm new here - some questions - Less Wrong
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Comments (51)
I'll have to come back and read the latter half of this tomorrow. In the meantime, welcome!
This isn't really the best place for a flood of low-quality ideas, though I certainly see the point in producing that flood. It seems to me that you'd do best to get a blog (there are a few of us on livejournal, and accounts there are easy to set up) and post links here when you have something that seems particularly worthwhile. If the overall signal to noise ratio there isn't too bad, you'll probably wind up with some readers, too.
As to your neurotype - well, you might want to work on tightening your writing up a bit, but even when it comes to that I don't expect anyone will hassle you about it. There are more than a few auties here, myself included, and I think we have a handful of ADD folks as well.
Also, your description of the kind of people you like to chat with sounds a bit like me. I'm fairly easily findable by this handle on several major IM systems, though my plate's a bit full these days and I might not have much time or energy to share.
I somewhat disagree, but it depends on how much a "flood" we're talking. Too many bad posts by a poster would be annoying and counterproductive because the poster would obviously not be taking the time to learn from their mistakes. However, the fastest way to become disabused of buggy thinking is to post it in public. That might annoy some who want to read only "high-quality" thoughts, but who cares? Those people can downvote and move along. A necessary prerequisite to becoming Less Wrong is to first be wrong, and to then realize that you are wrong. It seems to me that the discussion section is exactly the place where this process should occur.
Ah yes, good points there. Yeah, it really depends on the ratio of newcomers to oldcomers. Oldcomers get annoyed when they have to answer the same questions over and over again. Of course, they could just downvote and move along (in fact, it usually doesn't cost much effort to do that). But for some reason, they get annoyed (it might even be irrational to get annoyed so easily, but lots of people believe that it's hard not to get annoyed - and they often justify their annoyance).
And then the poster makes another post complaining about being downvoted. And when that one gets downvoted he accuses everyone of groupthink. Then it gets really nasty.
It my sound like I'm exaggerating, but this has already played out twice in the past two weeks.