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TheOtherDave comments on How to improve the public perception of the SIAI and LW? - Less Wrong
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Perhaps it would be useful to change the framing?
For example... if I join a book discussion group:
I understand that much of the discussion will not make any sense to me if I haven't read the book, and that there's a rapidly reached limit to how usefully I can participate in the discussion without having read the book.
I don't expect anyone to expend a lot of effort justifying the reading of the book to people skeptical about the benefits of doing so.
I don't expect anyone to summarize just the interesting parts of the book for me so I can participate in the discussion without actually reading the book.
All of this remains true even if the group welcomes new members who haven't read the book yet, but who hang around because the community's discussions seem interesting.
So, perhaps encouraging a similar attitude with respect to the Sequences would help manage some of the PR issues you identify surrounding them.
Of course, none of that would address the SIAI-related issues. Then again, from my perspective LW is already fairly separate from SIAI... at least, I participate in the former and not in the latter and nobody seems to mind... so I don't see a problem that needs solving there.
But I would not object to further separation, if a consensus emerged in favor of that.
An useful device here might be the word "about", LW is framed to be about rationality, so everyone who think they know anything about rationality think they can participate. However, in practice it is about a specific type of rationality (that it happens to be the type that can be considered the only one is for the moment irrelevant) that requires having read the sequences. From an outside view one might even argue that LW is "about" the sequences "rather than" rationality.
ciphergoth considers LW "a fan site for the sequences" (quote from Sunday). But this is only clear from people talking about them.
That's not unreasonable... certainly it's what got me to stick around.
And like any fan site, it's as much about enjoying the company of the sorts of people who find this sort of thing engaging as it is about the thing itself.