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ArisKatsaris comments on LW's image problem: "Rationality" is suspicious - Less Wrong
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Wouldn't dropping the rationality tagline instead convince people even more thoroughly that it's not actually about rationality, but rather something else?
That being said, I agree with those concerns. LW doesn't have an agenda per se (beyond being sponsored by the SIAI), but the LW majority clearly does. While harsh, "a bunch of fringe technophiles" accurately describes a significant, and vocal, fraction of people here.
Nowhere have I seen the dangers of AI more focused on than in LessWrong - as such I don't think LessWrong could be accurately summarized as being particularly technophilic.
I want to see who you summarize as particularly technophilic.
Have you ever met a technophobe? Opposition to life extension. Fear of nanotubes. Tolkein's aesthetics. Attraction to "natural remedies" and distrust of traditional medicine. Shouting 'hubris!'. Saying "you can't" in revulsed tones - not "it's not possible, look at my model" or "it would make you a bad person", just a gut rejection. Earlier, opposition to anaesthesia during childbirth and to industrialisation.
I would say something like Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" is particularly technophilic; it embraces basically every belief that has ever been associated with the word singularity, while sweeping essentially all concerns of danger or ethics under the rug essentially by hand-waving.
I would certainly say that LessWrongians tend to be at least slightly more technophilic than average people, but not much more than I would expect for a group that is centered around a website. Having conversations with other people, I tend to find that they appreciate modern technology and are cautiously optimistic about near future technology and concerned about medium to long term technology; the standard LessWrong positions seem to me to be fairly in line with this except for being far more thought-out.
EDIT: obviously my anecdotal evidence is highly incomplete and should mean very little.