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siduri comments on Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge - Less Wrong
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I voted your comment down for two reasons. The first is this:
Making sweeping statements about a subject with which you are admittedly unfamiliar seems like the sort of thing this community should discourage.
And in this particular case, I think you would be surprised. Parents come up against the limits of their power very, very early on, and modern parenting books are actually very forthright about it. Of course they try and put it nicely -- generally something like "You can't make a sweetpea into an azalea, but with good watering and fertile soil you can help your little sprout become the very best sweetpea he or she can be" -- but the message of being unable to push your child beyond the limits of their own aptitudes is made quite clearly and quite often.
The other reason I downvoted your comment was this:
This just seems unnecessarily coy. My guess is that you're talking about HBD, but I think you should either make your case or not bring it up at all.
I'm relatively new here and still learning the ropes--are comments explaining downvotes considered useful? I know I'd appreciate explanations when I get downvoted, but I don't know if others have the same preferences.
siduri:
I stand corrected, if that's the case. I'm glad if things have changed so much for the better then. (My other point from that paragraph still stands, though.)
No, that's not what I had in mind. (And how on Earth did you get from the topic of self-help to that? Does my writing really evoke such strong stereotypical associations with those dark corners of the web?)
I wanted to make it clear that I do have more examples in mind (rather than generalizing from one example), but the trouble is that it's hard to state them briefly and bluntly in a way that's likely to be taken seriously and without offense on anyone's part.
I wasn't the only one. But I apologize for misreading you.
I jumped there from the line "there are some quite ugly truths which I'd bet these books don't say, for example how depressingly little you can do beyond the limits imposed by heredity." The HBD crowd talks a lot about "ugly truths" involving "the limits imposed by heredity," too. I admit there's not much connection to self-help, although I'm moderately confident that a real HBD proponent would probably manufacture one if asked.
No need to apologize; in retrospect it's clear to me how you could have made that association. "HBD" (a term which I find quite silly) is not among my intellectual leitmotifs. In fact, I'm still not sure what to think of these controversies.
That said, however dangerous and incendiary this topic might be in the mainstream, on LW it's rarely approached but not at all problematic in the sense of inflaming passions and destroying discourse. Those few times I've seen it raised here, the discussion was entirely polite, knowledgeable, and without moral condemnations and protestations of offense. What exactly determines the patterns of dangerous discourse-breaking topics on LW and makes them different from the mainstream is a quite fascinating question, in my view.