Vladimir_M comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong

73 Post author: Vladimir_M 15 February 2011 09:17AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 19 February 2011 12:09:02PM 4 points [-]

Certainly, I find it comically absurd that there should be a community of people boasting about their "rationality" who at the same time have to obsessively self-censor to avoid turning their discussions into food fights.

The official motto in the logo is "refining the art of human rationality", which implies that our rationality is still imperfect. I don't see why it's absurd or bad PR to say that we're more rational than most other communities, but still not rational enough to talk about politics.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 19 February 2011 06:39:28PM *  3 points [-]

Merely saying that there are topics too inflammatory even for LW is one thing, but remember that the context of my remark was a discussion of whether topics should be avoided even if they have only indirect implications about something that might inflame passions. The level of caution that some people seem to believe should be exercised would in my opinion, if really necessary, constitute evidence against the supposedly high level of rationality on LW. (And on many people, the contradiction would also have a bad PR effect.)

Please also see my above reply to Vladimir Nesov in which I elaborate on this further.