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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (179)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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.