Konkvistador comments on Ritual Report: NYC Less Wrong Solstice Celebration - Less Wrong

83 Post author: Raemon 20 December 2011 08:37PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 23 December 2011 07:42:22PM *  1 point [-]

One thing I am slightly concerned about is having this be someone's first introduction to Less Wrong.

It has caught some attention beyond our little corner of the internet in the nearby blogosphere, but it's not Razib's first run in with LessWrong and he wasn't creeped out by it or anything.

Over at Less Wrong there is a discussion on the Winter Solstice celebration. It being Less Wrong there’s a great deal of introspective analysis. That’s fine. When I was younger I did the “Solstice” celebration thing, though today at this age I think that if you live in the United States you should just own or disown Christmas. If you look into the history of this specific celebration it becomes clear that it isn’t so clearly specifically Christian in origin. The reality is that really just reflects the cosmopolitan materialism of the West of our day. Most people have reservations about the materialism, but there’s obviously some social and personal utility in the holiday.

Comment author: Raemon 23 December 2011 08:09:03PM 2 points [-]

Interesting find. I was curious if any of the commenters ended up reading the article and saying anything. All I found was this:

This is probably bad of me, but reading the whole LW post and comments made me laugh quite a bit. I know they aren’t NTs, but they’re otherwise smart enough to realize they come across as having a massive tone of unwarranted self-importance, right?

Also I get jollies off a group of rationalists creating a premise off one of the most messed up science fiction writers in the world was seeing things with crystal clarity rather than being an emotionally disturbed racist autodidact shut-in who wrote fiction that reflected that fact.

I think this person would have approximately the same reaction to most of our stuff, not just a particularly grandiose ritual article, but this does cement my opinion that this piece shouldn't have been promoted. I'm not sure who to contact, I just sent a request to Eliezer but I'm sure we have more full-time moderators.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 December 2011 09:28:56PM *  2 points [-]

If we only ever promoted articles appropriate for those first running into LW, many of those promoted in the past shoudln't have been. That's far too harsh a standard to enforce. Not to mention it would make promoted articles a rather dull read (advanced rationality material is out the window and only a small fraction of intro posts would remain).

I don't think it was a mistake for it to be promoted in the sense of it clearly being something most of the community enjoyed and many people only read promoted articles. In many respects I think LW is basically better at accruing those who already happen to share our peculiar memes and shibboleths rather transforming people.

Which may or may not be a good thing, but it certainly isn't something that is much altered by this article.

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