= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Swimmer963 comments on Yes, a blog. - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (106)
Maybe I'm just being habitually contrarian here for no good reason, but it seems to me that for a supposedly "rationalist" community, people here seem to be far too willing to accept claims of LessWrong exceptionality based on shockingly weak evidence. Group-serving bias is possibly the most basic of all human biases, and we cannot even overcome that little?
Claiming that your group is the best in the world, or among the best, is something nearly every single group in history did, and all had some anecdotal "evidence" for it. Priors are very strongly against this claim, even after including these anecdotes.
Yet, in spite of these priors, the group you consider yourself member of is somehow the true best group ever? Really? Where's hard evidence for this? I'm tempted to point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics multiple times, and ignoring corrections from me and others, in case halo effect prevents you from seeing that he's not really extraordinarily less wrong.
There is a big difference between something being 'the best group ever' and being 'an easier shortcut to rationality than digging through philosophical writings the old-fashioned way', which is how I interpreted this post. There is a community component to LessWrong that obviously isn't present in old books, but I don't think that's paramount for most people. For me, in the beginning, the Sequences were just a good way to read about interesting ideas in small, digestible chunks during my breaks at work. Now it's a bit more than that; LessWrong gives me a chance to post my ideas where they'll be criticized by people who don't have any social-etiquette reason not to tear apart my arguments. But there's a big difference between a group being the optimum, the best any group of its kind could be, which LessWrong obviously isn't...and between being the best out of all the options in a limited area, which is more what this post is claiming (I think).
Reading books never was a good way to learn rationality. You need to learn it in practice, through discussion and debate, and you can do that in the context of mainstream philosophy because mainstream philosophy has its blogs and NGs too. (of course it doesn't have a "community" with a leader, a set off canonical works and a number of not-very provable doctrines everyone is supposed to subscribe to -- and it's better for it).