Explanation: Emotional overexcitability, a trait common to gifted people and yes there is good reason to believe that most LessWrongers are gifted may cause LW and Hackernews fans to be extra excitable and intense. You've probably heard that gifted people tend to be more emotional? Well on your LessWrong survey your respondents claimed an average IQ in the 140s, well beyond the minimums for all the IQ definitions for gifted. If these readers are unusually emotionally intense, as gifted people tend to be, it's likely their unusual "electricity" sets off less excitable people's cult radar, just as intensity can set off so many other radars, getting one judged as everything from a crybaby to a drama queen.

I think it's totally normal for excitable people to have passionate feelings about all kinds of things, including praising other people highly. I think of it as "normal for gifted people" - this is a different kind of normal. Check out this page from the Davidson Institute (a school for gifted children) which describes emotional overexcitability as "heightened, intense feelings, extremes of complex emotions, identification with others' feelings, and strong affective expression" and explains that we should accept them:

"Accept all feelings, regardless of intensity. For people who are not highly emotional, this seems particularly odd. They feel that those high in Emotional OE are just being melodramatic. Though we are all melodramatic on occasion, people with high Emotional OE really do feel their emotions with remarkable or atypical strength. If we accept their emotional intensity and help them work through any problems that might result, we will facilitate healthy growth."

From:

Overexcitability and the highly gifted child